MOSCOW The failed peace negotiations of spring 2022 haunt the public, as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues for the third year.
Kremlin has announcedthat the rejected draft agreement in 2022 could form the basis for new negotiations.
The big question is whether the negotiations at that time really could have stopped the war or whether they were mostly theater.
According to Russia, there was already a draft agreement on the table that could have ended the war, but the Ukrainians turned their backs on the negotiations.
The Russians’ narrative is that Britain and the United States crashed the negotiations.
In the West, on the other hand, it has been considered that Russia did not participate in the negotiations with real intent.
Historian Sergey Radchenko and an analyst at the RAND think tank Samuel Charap are writing In the Foreign Affairs magazine, that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi were ready for surprisingly far-reaching concessions to end the war in the spring of 2022.
Negotiations under the guise of fighting
The negotiations took place amid fierce fighting in Ukraine. The delegations met for the first time already on February 28 in Belarus.
At first, the Russian delegation practically demanded the surrender of Ukraine. However, the negotiations continued at the beginning of March still in Belarus and then remotely.
The focus of Russia’s demands was to keep Ukraine outside of NATO. The Ukrainian delegation, on the other hand, demanded security guarantees from the guarantor states of the peace agreement, which would oblige the countries to help Ukraine if Russia attacked again.
In Istanbul on March 29, the parties announced that they had adopted a joint statement. The plans were for the presidents of the countries Vladimir Putin and to Volodymyr Zelensky summit.
According to the public resolution, Ukraine was to be permanently declared a militarily non-aligned and nuclear-weapon-free state.
Instead, Ukraine would have received the security guarantees of the signatory countries, stronger than in the 1994 Budapest Agreement.
The guarantors of the agreement were the members of the UN Security Council, including Russia, as well as Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland and Turkey.
If Ukraine were to be attacked, all the guarantor countries would be obliged to respond to the request for help after consulting with Ukraine and among themselves.
The statement even listed what actions the guarantor countries should take: establishing a no-fly zone, arms deliveries or direct intervention with their own armed forces.
The guarantor states, including Russia, would have committed to promoting Ukraine’s EU aspirations. Charap and Radchenko find it surprising that the parties were required to agree peacefully on the status of the Crimean peninsula within 10 to 15 years.
Russia has always stuck to the claim that the Crimean peninsula belongs to Russia.
Now, however, the Russian leadership would have delayed negotiations on the status of the peninsula it occupies.
Russia’s withdrawal changed the situation
At the same time as the negotiations were taking place in Istanbul, Russia had to withdraw in the Kiev area and also on the northern front. The retreat brought to the public the atrocities of the Russian forces near Kiev in Butcha and Irpin.
The suspected war crimes affected public opinion in Ukraine, but they by no means immediately broke off the negotiations.
Charap and Radchenko say that they got to see two different draft contracts, from April 12 and 15. From the last draft has written also the Wall Street Journal.
During the negotiations, Russia tried to change the text so that it would have had the right to veto the actions of other guarantor countries. Ukrainians rejected the change.
Russia demanded that the size of Ukraine’s peacetime armed forces be limited to 85,000 soldiers, while Ukraine wanted an army of 250,000 soldiers. Russia also demanded severe restrictions on the number of Ukrainian tanks and artillery and the range of missiles.
Instead, borders and territories were not negotiated. It would obviously have been left for Putin and Zelensky to negotiate.
Despite significant disagreements, the draft dated April 15 implied that the agreement would be signed in two weeks.
A Ukrainian diplomat also participated in the negotiations Oleksandr Chalyi said in December 2023 that the end of the war with a peace treaty was very close in April 2022. According to Chalyi, Putin had realized that he had made a huge mistake when he started the attack.
Why did the negotiations break down?
It has often been estimated that the key turning point was the revelation of the bloodshed of the Russian forces in Butša.
On the other hand, according to the narrative favored by Russia, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kiev on April 9, 2022 to bring the US message to Zelensky that the war must be continued.
Radchenko and Charap write that there was no single reason for the collapse of the negotiations. Ukraine’s Western partners were reluctant to negotiate with Russia, especially if it would have meant new commitments to guarantee Ukraine’s security.
The question was why the United States and its allies would be willing to give such guarantees now, when they were unwilling to do so even before the war.
Researchers believe that the West did not force Ukraine out of the negotiations. Zelenskyi could have used his authority to persuade the West to the position of diplomacy if he wanted to.
After Russia’s attempt to encircle Kiev failed, Zelenskyi began to believe that Ukraine could win the war on the battlefield with Western support.
Radchenko and Charap estimate that the parties to the negotiations tried to reach a lasting and large-scale solution too early.
The last word on the spring 2022 negotiations has hardly been said yet.
The article has immediately attracted criticism.
Many commentators consider that Vladimir Putin’s administration is basically not a reliable negotiating partner.
For example, the program director for Eastern Europe at the Polish Foreign Policy Institute Daniel Szeligowski wrote in the message service X’s chain, that the agreement was never close because Russia was only trying to subjugate Ukraine.
However, Charap and Radchenko estimate that the negotiating drafts may contain useful ideas if and when the countries ever return to the negotiating table.