Blame Games and Claiming Credit: The Role of Proxies in Peace and War

While empirically international relations could offer endless examples of blame politics, in scholarship on blame games and credit-claiming strate-gies in the international realm quite some gaps are yet to be filled. In this vein, this chapter offers insights into the (long-running and still very top-ical) blame game in the context of the Minsk Peace Process in Donbas and Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. We explore how the challenges of indi-rect warfare and'occupation by proxy'(Kalandarishvili-Mueller 2022) may spill over to peace negotiations, offering fruitful ground for endless blame games and credit-claiming challenges. To highlight this problem, the chapter explains how Russia's attempts to claim credit for the so-called Donetsk People's Republic ('DPR') and Luhansk People's Republic ('LPR') as independent actors in the Minsk Peace Process met the challenge of Ukraine's considering direct talks with separatists a'red line'in the negotiations, and how the parties' strategies of blame-shifting contributed to the deadlock of the peace process.