Russia-Ukraine Cease-Fire Simulation
By 
Late last year it occurred to me that we might be getting cease-fire talks early in Trump 47. Since we always have a departmental Crisis Simulation in February, it further occurred to me that some hay might be made if we used Russia-Ukraine cease-fire talks as our own simulation. So it was written, and so it was:
Can the United States bring Russia and Ukraine to a stable peace or at least to a ceasefire? Negotiations to end the war are continuing in Saudi Arabia, with the possibility of a cease-fire appearing tantalizingly close.
Three weeks ago, we decided to mirror those negotiations by conducting a large-scale crisis simulation at the University of Kentucky. Wargaming is an imperfect tool for analyzing reality, but can prove useful for identifying roadblocks to a negotiated agreement. In this case, our simulated diplomats reached a ceasefire that unfortunately could not hold, resulting in a resumption of the war after a short pause.
The local PBS station covered us (I can’t get wordpress to embed the video, unfortunately). We modified our procedure to extent the sim out a bit and attack from a different perspective:
The simulation consisted of six teams, staffed mostly by foreign policy oriented graduate students: Russia, the United States, Ukraine, China, Turkey (in our simulation the host country) and a coalition team of European powers representing the United Kingdom and the European Union. Team advisors included University of Kentucky faculty, along with regional and issue-area experts such as Ambassador Carey Cavanaugh, LTC Amy McGrath (USMC Ret.), and Matthew Duss of the Center for International Policy.
The simulation proceeded in five rounds. Rounds one, two, and four (Adjudication Rounds, so named because judges assessed the likely success of actions) asked the teams to act as national leadership, using all of the tools of international statecraft from diplomacy to intelligence to military action to economic activity. This allowed teams to influence the terms of the negotiation by changing facts on the ground. Rounds three and five were Negotiation Rounds, notionally separated by two weeks of simulation time, in which the students portrayed members of high level diplomatic teams on site in Ankara.
Feel free to read the Universal Simulation Handbook and to peruse the post-sim rundowns of a few of the team leaders: