As President Donald Trump attempts to engage with Russia to end the conflict in Ukraine, supporters of the proxy war in Washington, Europe, and Ukraine claim that President Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator who cannot be trusted. The implication is that talking with the Kremlin is equivalent to surrender for Kiev because Putin wants all of Ukraine, and will use any pause in fighting to gear up for the next invasion.
However, history disproves that assertion. For Moscow, the war was never about seizing Ukrainian territory or attempting to reconstitute the USSR, but pushing back on NATO expansion after the bloc threatened to add Kiev as a member.
Before the invasion and in the early months of the war, Putin made serious offers to both Washington and Kiev to allow eastern and southern Ukraine to remain under Kiev’s control if the country agreed not to join NATO.
The Joe Biden administration outright refused to negotiate on those terms, even if they were acceptable to Kiev. Preventing those talks from occurring first provoked the Russian invasion, then prevented it from ending within a few months.
As Scott Horton explains in the following excerpt from his latest book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, there were talks in Istanbul, Turkey that nearly ended with conflict within two months.
A Ukrainian negotiator explained the dialogue was “completely successful” and could have allowed the war to come to an end by April 2022. But Western leaders like then-United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not want peace, and pressed Kiev to fight.
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U.S., UK Prevent Peace
Early indications that Russia and Ukraine could achieve a quick negotiated solution soon gave way to the reality that the Biden administration was instead determined to drag out the war to “weaken Russia.”
One day after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked about the proposed terms to begin negotiations. Though an innocent third person might have assumed that achieving a ceasefire and early end to the fighting would be the highest priority, Price made it clear this was not the case with the American administration. “Those are not the conditions for real diplomacy,” he said.
As Secretary Blinken confirmed in October 2022, the only time he had spoken to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov since February 15, 2022, nine days before the invasion, was over the release of the basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been convicted of bringing a THC vape pen into the country. Otherwise, the policy was “Do not engage.”
Two days after the war began, Zelensky said he wanted to negotiate. “We are not afraid to talk to Russia. We are not afraid to say everything about security guarantees for our state. We are not afraid to talk about neutral status. We are not in NATO now.” But he said the main question was “what security guarantees will we have? And what specific countries will give them? We need to talk about the end of this invasion. We need to talk about a ceasefire.”
Belarus Talks
The two sides met in Gomel, Belarus on February 28. Though they did not make a deal, they departed on positive terms and agreed to talk again on March 3. Early attempts at negotiation by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, though they showed some promise, went nowhere without American interest or support. The Financial Times reported on March 16 that negotiators had “made significant progress” on a ceasefire deal, based on a Russian withdrawal in exchange for neutrality and limits on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. They said Lavrov had also told them they were very close to a deal.
Bennett
Both sides trusted former Prime Minister Bennett, so at the same time their agents were meeting in Belarus, Putin and Zelensky were communicating through him, outlining the major points of the ceasefire. As Bennett later explained in an interview, Putin promised not to kill Zelensky and dropped his demand for the “disarmament of Ukraine.” In return, Zelensky vowed to drop his attempts to join NATO. Instead, they agreed on something they called the “Israeli model,” which would keep Ukraine outside of NATO, but well-armed enough to guarantee its own independence. “I had the impression at the time that both sides were very interested in a ceasefire,” Bennett said. But the Americans decided to “crush Putin rather than to negotiate.” The former PM did not seem to disagree with the policy, but was just being honest about it. “I think there was a decision by the west (a legitimate one) that right now what’s needed is to keep hitting Putin and not to reach a ceasefire. … I’ll tell you what — I’m not sure they were mistaken.” He said he was merely “acting as an intermediary,” adding, “Everything I did was coordinated to the smallest detail not just with the U.S. but also Germany and France.”
When asked if the U.S. stopped the negotiations, Bennett replied, “Yes, basically they stopped it and at the time I thought they were making a mistake.” He continued, “[T]here’s a not-too-bad chance they could have reached [an agreement] if they didn’t stop it. Not for sure. But I’m not arguing that it was correct to try. In real time I thought it was correct to reach a ceasefire — now I don’t know.”
Though Bennett later tried to walk back his claims, saying there was only a 50 percent chance of making a deal at the time, it is obvious he was being honest the first time and trying to get out of trouble for it.
Fiona Spills
It was only later we found out that was exactly what had happened: both the Ukrainians and Russians had been prepared to make serious concessions to bring the war to an early end. The diplomats had ironed out a few differences, and it was time for the presidents to meet to make the bigger decisions. Fiona Hill confirmed in Foreign Affairs in the fall of 2022 that they had been on the verge of a deal, citing former U.S. officials. “In April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” she explained. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
Nay No Ned
On March 21, State Department spokesman Price shot down a question about the peace talks, saying the president had “made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.” He elaborated, “[T]his is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine.” This was about the whole world order. “[T]here are principles that are at stake here that have universal applicability everywhere, [including] the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right … to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances.”
The reporter got his drift. “But does that mean that if under pressure of negotiation and war, that Zelensky gives up the previous desire to join NATO … that the U.S. wouldn’t go along with … a negotiated agreement?” Price refused to answer.
At that time, Kiev was in a better position to negotiate than at any point after. And by the end of March, Zelensky was signaling that he was willing to make major concessions to achieve an early end to the war. As Anchal Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy, “These include a commitment to Ukrainian neutrality with respect to military alliances, a rejection of any nuclear arsenal, and an acceptance of Russian control over Ukraine’s eastern regions.” She said, “He even indicated a readiness to change language policies that had disadvantaged Russian speakers. Zelensky’s announcements gave the face-to-face talks convening this week in Istanbul some hope of a ceasefire.”
When White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked what the U.S. was doing to encourage diplomacy, she responded only that “[t]he role that we feel we can play most effectively is by continuing to provide a broad range of security assistance, military assistance to them as well as economic and humanitarian assistance to strengthen their hand in these negotiations.”
Turkey
On March 29, the parties convened in Istanbul, where they issued the Istanbul Communiqué based on Ukraine’s proposals. The key concession from the Ukrainian side was an offer of “permanent” neutrality, to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, recognize de facto Russian sovereignty over Crimea, punt on the question of the future of the Donbas and promise not to host any foreign forces on their soil. In exchange they would receive security guarantees from Western nations and Russia, including a promise to be allowed to join the EU. These represented major concessions by Russia compared to its attempt to sack the Ukrainian capital and achieve regime change just weeks before. For their part, “Russian negotiators said they would look into these proposals while Russia [would] ‘drastically reduce’ military activity near the cities of Chernihiv and Kyiv ‘to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations.’”
Alexey Arestovich
Then-Zelensky adviser Alexey Arestovich, the same man who had seemed to predict the war and accept its inevitability three years before, later said that the talks had been “completely successful.” Having participated in the Istanbul negotiations, he explained that “it was the most profitable agreement we could have done. … We opened the champagne bottle. We had discussed demilitarization, denazification, issues concerning the Russian language, Russian church and much else.” He continued, “And that month, it was the question of the amount of Ukrainian armed forces in peacetime, and President Zelensky said, ‘I could decide this question indirectly with Mr. Putin.’” Arestovich added, “The Istanbul agreements were a protocol of intentions and was 90 percent prepared for directly meeting with Putin. That was to be the next step of negotiations.”
Boris Johnson
But then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to town with an offer of weapons and a message from the Biden administration: now was not the time to negotiate. They should instead increase the pressure on Putin. If Ukraine made a deal with Russia, they could not count on U.S. and UK support. So the talks were canceled. This tragic tale was told in extensive reporting by Ukrainska Pravda — a paper with a similar name but no ties to the Russian publication. In fact, it is owned by Dragon Capital, in a fund managed by Soros Fund Management LLC, and has a strong pro-Kiev slant. They said Johnson “appeared in the capital almost without warning” with two messages from Biden. The first was, “Putin should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and the second was that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.” Then they got right to the heart of the issue: “[T]he collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to ‘press him.’”
As Michael von der Schulenburg, a former UN assistant secretary-general, later explained: “As late as 27 March 2022, Zelensky had shown the courage to defend the preliminary results of the Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations in public in front of Russian journalists — despite the fact that NATO had by then already decided at its special summit on 24 March 2022 … to oppose these peace negotiations. In the end, Zelensky gave in to NATO pressures and opted for a continuation of the war.”
Lavrov later said that after a workable proposal was on the table, in mid-April the Ukrainians simply broke off talks. Putin complained that after Istanbul, “Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals. These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.” He was obviously being a major hypocrite in saying this, since he was surely playing his own role in the conflict. But he was not wrong.
