Foreign Service Journal

The Foreign Service Journal's 2025 "In Their Own Write" collection 

John J. Maresca with Ida Manton: Ukraine: Putin’s War for Russia’s “Near Abroad”

https://afsa.org/in-their-own-write-2025.

During a 28-year Foreign Service career, John Maresca served in numerous high-level positions across Europe and played a pivotal role in ending the Cold War following the collapse of the USSR. In Ukraine, he and Ida Manton offer a firsthand account of the long set of negotiations that culminated in Paris in 1990. They recount the past situation in the region, explaining how it led to today’s war in Ukraine.

John Maresca joined the Foreign Service in 1966. He served as chief of staff for two secretaries general of NATO and began negotiating with the USSR in Helsinki in 1972. He served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from 1989 to 1992. After serving as U.S. special envoy to the newly independent states, he became a roving American conflict mediator, seeking to resolve local conflicts in Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabakh, and regions of former Yugoslavia before retiring in 1994.

Ida Manton is a scholar and lecturer in international relations and diplomacy, with a focus on negotiations and conflict resolution. She has coordinated OSCE’s oral history project, through which negotiators share their recollections of how milestone agreements were created.