New evidence that the US blocked the Ukraine/Russia peace deal
By Aaron Mate June 27, 2024
The collapse of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in April-May 2022. President Vladmir Putin has directly accused the US and UK of sabotaging the negotiations in Istanbul, President Biden and his top principals have never offered a rebuttal.
An anonymous senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov said “I know for a fact the United States didn’t pull the plug on that. We were watching it carefully.” https://www.wsj.com/.../did-ukraine-miss-an-early-chance...
The New York Times has published a lengthy account of the Istanbul talks based on insider sources, including three Ukrainian negotiators, as well as leaked copies of draft treaties disclosed publicly for the first time. The Times’ reporting underscores that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators made significant progress. It also offers new evidence that the Biden administration stood in the way. Yet rather than acknowledge the West’s role in blocking a peace deal, the Times offers up a dubious new excuse from the Ukrainian side for walking away. https://www.nytimes.com/.../ukraine-russia-ceasefire-deal...
The Istanbul agreement, as summarized in a Ukrainian authored document known as the Istanbul Communiqué, would have seen Ukraine accept permanent neutrality, rule out NATO membership, not host foreign military bases, and limit the size of its armed forces. In exchange, Russia would withdraw its military and pledge to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and security. The status of Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region would have been left to future negotiations.
Yet rather than acknowledge that a peace deal was within reach, the Times adopts the NATO-Ukrainian narrative that Russia sought Kyiv’s capitulation. The Times minimized Russian grievances about the influence of neo-Nazis and a crackdown on Russian culture inside Ukraine.
According to the Times, Russia’s proposed text “targeted Ukraine’s national identity, including a ban on naming places after Ukrainian independence fighters.” Yet Russia asked Ukraine to ban “the glorification and propaganda in any form of Nazism and neo-Nazism, the Nazi movement and organizations associated therewith,” including the naming of Ukrainian streets and memorials after Nazi collaborators. Moscow’s demands can hardly be seen as an affront to “Ukraine’s national identity.” With NATO states having sided with the numerically small but politically influential ultra-nationalist movement inside Ukraine – including the Azov battalion, a more accurate characterization is that Russia’s proposed curbs on Nazism were an affront to a key Western ally.
The Times confirms that the US did not like what it was hearing from Istanbul, writing “American officials were alarmed at the terms” of the proposed deal and relayed their concerns to the Ukrainians. A former senior US official characterized the deal as an act of surrender: “We quietly said, ‘You understand this is unilateral disarmament, right?’”
In fact, much like seeking the de-glorification of Nazis, Russia’s bid for permanent Ukrainian neutrality was not an outlandish demand. It was a request to revert to Ukraine’s July 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty, which affirmed Ukraine’s “intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs.” This was the position of elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych before he was ousted in the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014, as well as the plurality if not majority opinion inside Ukraine over many years.
As F. Stephen Larrabee, a former Soviet specialist on the US National Security Council wrote in 2011, “the main obstacle” to Ukraine's ascension to NATO “is not Russian opposition… but low public support for membership in Ukraine itself.”
In seeking to override both Ukraine’s founding constitution and popular opinion, the Biden administration was therefore not “alarmed” that Ukraine’s neutrality meant “unilateral disarmament.” Instead, it wanted to preserve the US led militarization of Ukraine as a de-facto NATO proxy on Russia’s border.
The former US official also claimed that White House believed Putin was “salivating” at the prospect of peace. The Times also acknowledges that the Russian president appeared to be “micromanaging” the talks from Moscow bolstering the case that he was indeed serious. Two Ukrainian negotiators also told the Times that they saw the Russians as serious, with one noting that Putin “reduced his demands” over time. For example, after initially insisting that Ukraine recognize Crimea “as an integral part of the Russian Federation,” Moscow dropped that request.
Accordingly, as Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi later admitted, the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise” and “were very close in the middle of April 2022... to finalize the war with some peace settlement.” Putin, he said, “tried to do everything possible to conclude (an) agreement with Ukraine.”
The two sides indeed made so much progress that the Istanbul Communiqué’s final item foresees the possibility of convening a meeting “between the presidents of Ukraine and Russia with the aim of signing an agreement and/or making political decisions regarding the remaining unresolved issues.” Two weeks later, a 16-page draft treaty (including six annexes), dated April 15th, made its way to Putin’s desk.
Under the proposed agreement, Ukraine’s security would be assured by guarantor states, including the US and Russia. On this issue, outlined in Article 2, there was no dispute. But according to the Times, Moscow tried to add a clause in Article 5 concerning the guarantors’ response in the event of an armed attack on Ukraine.
Moscow proposed that if Ukraine were to be attacked (by any nation, NOT RUSSIA), the guarantors would need to unanimously agree on any military response.
In the Times lied writing this would mean that “Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition that Kyiv quickly identified as a dealbreaker.” Article 2 of the draft treaty binds any guarantor state or party to the treaty – including Russia – “to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine, its sovereignty and independence, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.” Accordingly, were Russia to flagrantly violate the treaty by invading Ukraine, it would have no grounds to invoke a different section of the treaty to prevent other states from responding to its attack. If one party violates a treaty it cannot expect others to continue adhering to it. Therefore, if Russia were to attack Ukraine, it would not have right to stop someone else from responding.
The Times-Ukrainian claim that this Russian proposal was a “dealbreaker” is not only dubious on its own, but contradicted by the available record.
Did Ukraine Miss an Early Chance to Negotiate Peace With Russia? - WSJ
New York Times editorial on the court's ruling that gives Trump if elected president in November the path to dictatorship on steroids. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/opinion/supreme-court-presidential-immunity-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4E0.gEKG.yRPMubPLiolW&smid=url-share