John Jefferson
Ukraine is in trouble. The Russian armed forces are advancing across eastern Ukraine. From Velyka Novosilka and Vhuledar in the south, to Kurakhove and Pokrovsk in the center and Toretsk and Chasiv Yar in the north, heavily fortified cities and crucial logistical hubs are being encircled, conquered, and bypassed, jeopardizing the Ukrainian armed force’s ability to supply its troops by road or rail and leaving larging undefended fields to the west for Russian troops to flow over as they capture the Donbas region of Ukraine.
In the second half of 2024, Russia captured 3,600 square kilometers of land, with 1,500 being captured in October and November alone. The dangerous trend is continuing.
More crucial than the loss of land is the attrition of weapons, and more worrisome still is the loss of lives. By some not unreasonable estimates, between 500,000 and 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded, and at least 100,000 more have deserted.
But it need not have been like this. In the first days and weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a window of opportunity for a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine could have lost no further territory and few lives.
But while the U.S. continued to press the war in pursuit of its own foreign policy priorities, including the assertion of the right of NATO to expand as far as it likes, including right up to Russia’s borders, it made the public case that the war was justified because Russia had invaded a sovereign country. However, as Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson argue in their chapter in the new book Media, Dissidence and the War in Ukraine, a just war requires more than a just cause. For a war to be just, it also needs to be “the last resort after all other means of resolving a conflict have been exhausted.” For the war with Russia to be a just war, diplomacy with Russia needs to have been explored, attempted and exhausted. It was not.
When the bilateral talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul bore the promise of a negotiated settlement and even produced an initial draft agreement, instead of encouraging and fully exploring diplomacy, the U.S. and its Western partners discouraged the talks.
How do we know? Because negotiators and officials from Ukraine and its Western partners who were there tell us so. The list of witnesses is growing, with the latest testimonies coming from Swiss, Ukrainian and American officials.
In March and April of 2022, Ukrainian and Russian officials met in Istanbul where they negotiated and initialed a “draft peace treaty.” Oleksiy Arestovych, a former Advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine and a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, has even added the previously unreported detail that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin were scheduled to meet on April 9 and a ceasefire was to take place. But instead of nurturing that promise of peace, the U.S. discouraged it.
“There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue,” Turkey’s then Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said. They want to “let the war continue and Russia get weaker.” And Cavusoglu is not the only Turkish official to offer that diagnosis of the Turkish brokered talks. Numan Kurtulmus, the deputy chairman of Erdogan’s ruling party, said, “In certain matters, progress was made, reaching the final point, then suddenly we see that the war is accelerating… Someone is trying not to end the war. The United States sees the prolongation of the war as its interest… There are those who want this war to continue… Putin-Zelensky was going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.”
Other mediators of the talks have said the same. At the request of Zelensky, then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett played a role in mediating the talks. According to Bennett, the U.S. “blocked” the talks.
Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was also asked by Kiev to play a role in mediating the Istanbul talks, and he provides the same account. Schröder says that “nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington… [T]he Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed.”
Members of Ukraine’s negotiating team have also confirmed the claim. Ukrainska Pravda reported that on April 9, 2022, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson hurried to Kiev to tell Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “the West was not.” Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, has confirmed that Western interference: “When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” Arestovych has expressed skepticism that Johnson would have interfered in that way without his signals coming from Washington.
Arakhamiia has also said that the West “actually advised us not to go into ephemeral security guarantees.”
Some have attributed Ukraine’s pulling out of the talks to their horror at Russian atrocities in Bucha. But on April 5, 2022, the day after Zelensky visited Bucha, though he told Ukrainian journalists that what happened in Bucha was “unforgivable” and will make “the possibility of negotiations… a challenge,” he added that, even after Bucha, “you have to do it. I think that we have no other choice.”
Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko report that, after the discovery at Bucha in early April, “the two sides continued to work around the clock on a treaty that Putin and Zelensky were supposed to sign during a summit to be held in the not-too-distant future,” suggesting that it was not Bucha that terminated the talks. Drafts of the treaty were still being worked on by the two sides as late as April 12 and April 15, ten days after Zelensky had visited Bucha. Arestovych has recently revealed that the talks actually continued to as late as May 17.
Charap and Radchenko say that the talks not only continued after the discovery at Bucha, they “even intensified.” They conclude that the discovery of atrocities at Bucha were no more than “a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making” about aborting the talks.
In addition to Arestovych’s recent testimony, recent support comes from American officials and, even more recently, from Swiss officials.
Victoria Nuland, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs who, as point woman on the Obama State Department’s Ukraine policy, has had a hand in the conflict in Ukraine going back to the 2014 coup, has now implied that the U.S. was actively involved in killing the negotiations in Istanbul.
The New York Times in June reported that “American officials were alarmed at the terms” and patronizingly asked the Ukrainians, who had agreed to those terms, whether they “understand this is unilateral disarmament.” Nuland confirmed this reporting.
According to Nuland, the negotiations fell apart when the Ukrainians asked for advice, and “people outside Ukraine,” that is, in the United States, questioned whether the agreement was a good deal.
Charap and Radchenko also report that “a former U.S. official who worked on Ukraine policy at the time” told them that, faced with concerns about the draft treaty, “instead of embracing the Istanbul communiqué and the subsequent diplomatic process, the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv.”
The most recent testimony comes from Jean-Daniel Ruch, the Swiss ambassador to Turkey during the talks. Ruch was in Turkey at the time to consult on the idea of neutrality for Ukraine.
Ruch agrees with other officials who were there, like Bennet and Schröder, that “the West pulled the plug on the negotiations that were on the edge of leading to a ceasefire.”
Ruch mourns that “We had the opportunity to stop a war…. So, why did all these people die? And this really got to me. I found that there was something deeply immoral in the decisions that were taken in London, in Washington, in Kiev… because we had a ceasefire close at hand, and then it’s the Americans, with their British allies, who said no.”
Like the Turkish officials, Ruch reports that “the chief negotiator told me, you know, I’m not optimistic because there are some great powers that have a global agenda and that are in no hurry to put an end to this war.”
To be justified, a war requires not only a just cause, but to be the last resort after all peaceful means have been exhausted. But rather than encouraging and exploring the significant diplomatic progress that had been made between Ukraine and Russia, the U.S discouraged it, “blocked” it, “pulled the plug on the negotiations” and said “no.”
It is possible that, before the war reached its current horrific loss of lives, there could have been peace in Ukraine. But, as the roster of witnesses grows, the case against America’s contribution to the continuation of the war grows stronger.
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