‘We had to buy time’

A Ukrainian negotiator said Moscow offered peace in exchange for Kyiv ending its NATO bid. Russia’s propagandists were thrilled.

On November 24, Ukrainian parliament member Davyd Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation in peace talks with Russia, said in an interview that the Kremlin offered in the spring of 2022 to end the war if Ukraine dropped its aspirations to join NATO. According to Arakhamia, Kyiv rejected the deal, believing it to be a ploy that would allow the Russian army to regroup before resuming its invasion. The lawmaker also said that one of the people who discouraged Ukraine’s delegation from negotiating with Russia at the time was then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who urged the country’s leaders to “just fight.” Meduza has compiled some of the most notable reactions to Arakhamia’s statements from prominent figures on both sides of the conflict.

On November 24, Ukrainian parliamentary deputy Davyd Arakhamia caused a stir when he said in a TV interview that during the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine held in Belarus and Turkey in February–March 2022, Moscow’s delegation offered to end the war in exchange for Kyiv vowing not to join NATO.

“They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn’t join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification,’ the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah,” Arakhamia said.

When asked why Ukraine didn’t agree to Russia’s terms, Arakhamia was resolute:

First of all, to agree to this point, we would have to change the [Ukrainian] Constitution. Our path to NATO is written into the Constitution. Second of all, we did not and still do not trust the Russians to keep their word. This would only have been possible if we had security guarantees. We couldn’t sign something, walk away, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and then [Russia] would invade, only more prepared this time — because the first time they invaded, they were actually unprepared for us to resist so much. So we could only work [with them] if we were 100 percent confident that this wouldn’t happen a second time. And we don’t have that confidence.

Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all, and that we should just fight.

He added that the U.K. and Ukraine’s other Western partners were informed about the negotiations and the proposed agreements but that they didn’t make any decisions for Kyiv, giving only advice. “They actually advised us not to enter into any ephemeral security guarantees [with Russia], which were impossible [for Russia] to give at that time,” he explained.

Arakhamia also said that today, Ukraine’s political and military leadership remains in favor of continuing to fight. “Why? Because we can’t go to the negotiating table right now. We’re in a very weak negotiating position. Why would we sit down for talks right now? What, let’s just stay where we are? Do you think Ukrainian society would accept that?” he said.

What public figures in Russia and Ukraine are saying

In the summer of 2023, Vladimir Putin said that Russia and Ukraine had come to a peace agreement at the beginning of the full-scale war. He claimed that this was the reason Russia had withdrawn its forces from central Ukraine, and that Kyiv had responded by “abandoning all previous agreements” and “throwing them all into the dustbin of history.”

At a meeting with African leaders in St. Petersburg, Putin even briefly showed the document that he called an “agreement on the permanent neutrality and security guarantees of Ukraine.” According to Russian media, the agreement was dated from April 15, 2022. It consisted of 18 articles, the first of which included Ukraine’s neutrality. An attachment to the document specified the maximum size of the army and military arsenal Ukraine would be allowed to maintain.

In his November 24 interview, Davyd Arakhamia noted that Putin never published the document in full. “Why do you think that is? If he had the document, he would have released it,” he argued.

Despite this, numerous Russian commentators took Arakhamia’s interview as proof of Putin’s story about the peace agreement and of earlier claims in the pro-Kremlin media that Kyiv left the negotiating table under pressure from Boris Johnson and Ukraine’s other Western partners.

Margarita Simonyan

Russian propagandist, editor-in-chief of RT

The Ukrainian deputy told the truth, unable to stop himself. And it turns out we were right this whole time. Putin was telling the truth, and it seems that hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided, and Ukraine could have been prevented from turning into the country of disabled people and emigrants that it’s now become. A country with a broken spine — in its economic, political, and social life, and, most importantly, in its moral spirit.

Leonid Slutsky

Leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, member of the Russian peace talks delegation

It’s obvious that the neo-Nazi regime is seeking an exit route. It’s not too late to return to the path of negotiations; the Russian side has repeatedly said that it’s willing to meet. But this time, it would be under different conditions — with new territorial realities.

Back [in March 2022], a peace agreement really was essentially ready; all that was left was to initial and sign it. Russia withdrew its troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions as a gesture of goodwill. And then what? The Kyiv regime and its Western puppetmasters — and we now understand this all more clearly — carried out a false-flag operation in Bucha and vowed to defeat Russia on the battlefield.

Rybar

Pro-war Telegram channel run by former Russian Defense Ministry Press Service employee Mikhail Svinchuk

It might seem odd that the Ukrainians would admit to being so tied up with the British. But it’s all very simple: Ukraine’s ruling circles have strong ties to ultra-Orthodox groups in Israel, and in the past few months, they haven’t been big fans of the West. Moreover, there’s currently a conflict between the respected Western partners and the Israeli leadership.

At first, as part of the overall media shutdown of its “Ukraine” project, the West began to tell the story of how Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) and Defense Ministry were supplying Hamas (thus exposing their Kyiv proteges). Then the Ukrainians retaliated by revealing the external nature of the country’s leadership, pointing fingers at the British and crying, “This is all their fault!” The idea that Ukraine’s leaders, under foreign control, would make a move like that without coordination is nonsense.

Start paying more attention to the news: there will be a lot more revelations and surprises like this.

Marina Akhmedova

Propagandist, editor-in-chief of the pro-Kremlin outlet Regnum, member of Russian Presidential Human Rights Council

These well-fed faces always say there’s no reason for them to come to the negotiating table, but the most important reason that they should come negotiate is to save the lives of their soldiers and civilians. Ukraine banned the phrase “deadlock” after Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi used it in an article he wrote. But this didn’t change the fact that the country is in a deadlock. […] Their efforts to stay in power cause people to die every day.

Russian Embassy in London

Thus, evidently, with substantial #UK input, an off-ramp for a negotiated solution was missed - with tragic consequences for Ukrainian statehood, economy and population.Would the British government care to comment on Arakhamia’s statements? Would the UK Government care to comment on Arakhamia’s assertions?

Ukrainian officials have so far not commented directly on Arakhamia’s interview. However, sources with connections to Ukraine’s delegation in the peace talks told journalists that they weren’t interested in signing an agreement with Russia in the spring of 2022.

“We had to buy time while our Western partners came to their senses and started making decisions that would ultimately allow us to keep fighting. To this end, we tried to get the Russians involved in discussions about details so that they would constantly have to be coordinating with Moscow,” an anonymous source with links to the negotiations told the Ukrainian outlet LB.ua.

Regarding the British leader’s involvement in the 2022 peace talks, Lb.ua wrote the following:

Johnson never hid his opposition to the idea of Ukraine making concessions to the Russian dictator. He believed that Putin’s only desire was to capture Ukraine, destroy it, and prepare to occupy part of Europe. We hope nobody has forgotten that before Putin’s invasion, he demanded that the West withdraw NATO forces to the borders of 1997, cancelling the membership of the Alliance’s Central and Eastern European members.

The news site Strana.ua (which is frequently criticized in Ukraine for being “pro-Russian” but is also blocked in Russia, like many Ukrainian outlets) called Arakhamia’s arguments about reasons for the 2022 negotiations’ failure “ambiguous.” The outlet’s journalists characterized the NATO aspirations laid out in Ukraine’s Constitution as a “mere technical problem if the political will is there.” And the issue of distrust, according to Strana, was primarily on Moscow’s side rather than Kyiv’s.

Later, the Ukrainian authorities named one more reason for their refusal: the tragedy in Bucha. However, if you recall the statements made by Zelensky at the time, he said immediately after the tragedy that negotiations with Russia were necessary. “Every tragedy like this, every Bucha will affect negotiations. But we need to find opportunities for these steps,” he said on April 5, 2022. Only later did he become more categorical.

So the conventional wisdom is that one of Zelensky’s main motives for refusing to sign a deal with Putin in 2022 was that he (perhaps under the influence of arguments and promises from his Western partners) concluded that Russia wasn’t ready for a big war, and that Ukraine could, with the West’s help, completely destroy the Russian army and dictate its conditions for peace to Moscow, including the withdrawal of Russian troops back to the borders of 1991, the payment of reparations, and so on. In other words, Zelensky chose two birds in the bush over one in the hand.

Former Adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine Oleksii Arestovych (who effectively served as the Ukrainian authorities’ spokesman in the spring of 2022 but has since become an outspoken critic of the Zelensky administration) said that it would be “irrational” for Ukrainians to blame “themselves” for the breakdown of the 2022 negotiations, and as a result, a “sharp rise in anti-Western sentiment is possible in the country.”

According to Arestovych, while the Ukrainian authorities are shifting the blame for the country’s military failures on one another, it’s the West who’s really responsible:

Zelensky, it seems, has decided to split the blame between Johnson and Zaluzhnyi. I believe this is a false dilemma. The real responsibility lies with those who promised us, Ukraine, real support for a real, large-scale war and did not provide it. Essentially, they betrayed us.

We won our war. We defeated the regular Russian army and thwarted their invasion plan on our own, with minimal help from the West. The first Ramstein [Air Base meeting] was held only on April 26, [2022], and the first significant shipment of supplies wasn’t until the end of June. Our war could have ended with the Istanbul agreements, and several hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive. But then a different war began.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the U.K. government have not responded to Davyd Arakhamia’s comments.