What we know about the negotiations suggests that there was never a deal on the table that would have left Ukraine secure from Russian conquest.
What we know about the negotiations suggests that there was never a deal on the table that would have left Ukraine secure from Russian conquest.
T here’s a powerful myth that circulates among critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine. It has begun to creep even into the statements of President Donald Trump. The just-so story — promoted by Vladimir Putin in his interview with Tucker Carlson — is told in different ways, but it typically goes something like this:
- Russian and Ukrainian negotiators sat down early in the war, in the spring of 2022, and reached a deal, or at least were very close to one;
- Ukraine became overconfident due to early battlefield success and Western support, and blew up the deal;
- Volodymyr Zelensky, in deciding to go down this path, was heavily influenced by Boris Johnson (then the U.K. prime minister), who wanted the war to continue;
- Had Ukraine accepted the deal, it could have escaped with its territory or at least its sovereignty intact, but would have had to renounce joining NATO; and
- Therefore, the continuation of war for the past three years is essentially Ukraine’s fault and proof that Putin is right to resist by arms any Ukrainian step toward NATO membership, and this justifies abandoning Zelensky now to leave him to face the consequences of a bad choice.
We can trace the origins of this myth, which “first emerged in an article in the respected Ukrainska Pravda outlet in May 2022, which said that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators had agreed on a broad possible agreement after a meeting in Istanbul in late March. A week later, Johnson arrived with a message that ‘Putin is a war criminal, he needs to be pressured, not negotiated with’, according to one of the outlet’s sources.”
A partial quote from a Ukrainian negotiator fed the narrative:
In November 2023, David Arakhamia, a member of Zelenskyy’s own negotiating team in Istanbul, appeared to lend the idea credence. “When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight,” he said in a November 2023 interview. Russian sources seized on these words, ignoring another part of the interview in which Arakhamia had said the Ukrainian delegation had not planned to sign anything in any case.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson last year, Putin brought up the story, claiming it showed the west had pushed Ukraine further into the war. “It seems very sad that they followed the orders or requests of Mr Johnson. As Mr Arakhamia said: ‘We could have ended these military actions a year and a half ago, but the Brits talked us out of it so we refused.’ And where is Mr Johnson now? And the war goes on,” said Putin.
Comments by Victoria Nuland, a former State Department official in the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, have also fed this storyline, although Nuland similarly argues that Western skepticism only confirmed what Ukraine had already concluded: There was not a deal on the table that Ukraine could survive taking: “Relatively late in the game the Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going and it became clear to us, clear to the Brits, clear to others that Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on,” as “plenty of people and perhaps Zelensky himself were very suspicious that they were about to fall into a trap.” Critics of Ukraine aid have taken a similar approach to portions of comments by former Trump adviser Fiona Hill, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
As is typical of usable myths, there are strains of truth here, but the myth far outruns the evidence. In fact, from what we can gather from the public record, while the talks between the two sides were extensive between late February and mid-April 2022:
- There was never a finally agreed deal between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators;
- The deals on the table would have stripped territory from Ukraine and limited its military and barred it from joining NATO, and the Ukrainians were prepared to agree at least in principle to all three of these conditions;
- The parties negotiated on a series of topics (ranging from external security guarantees to the end of international sanctions) that could not be finalized without the agreement of Western powers who were being asked to make commitments; and
- The deal-breaker was Russian insistence that any security guarantees given to Ukraine in exchange for its effective disarmament must be subject to a veto by . . . Russia itself.
That final condition, from which Russia refused to budge, was a giant signal that the entire point of the negotiations was to simply pause the war. The evident purpose of such a pause was for Russia to resume the war at a later date on more favorable terms and effectively eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation, much in the way Russia and its co-conspirators partitioned Poland off the map in three stages between the 1772 and 1795. If the goal of ending this war is peace, rather than the temporary cessation of war (as I explained Wednesday), you can see why that’s a non-starter.
The Fog of Jaw-Jaw
Before diving into the record of the peace talks, a few reminders are in order. First, there is a lot of posturing that goes on in any negotiation, and at the end of the day, there are only two kinds of deal: a final deal or no deal. So long as the most important terms have not been nailed down, even those items that seem to have been settled can be renegotiated. Moreover, even the highest-level negotiators with the clearest instructions can’t bind a government until the principals sign off. We saw a vivid illustration of this when American and Ukrainian diplomats worked out a minerals deal that fell apart the moment Trump and Zelensky got in a room together.
Second, the combatants in a propaganda war have strong incentives to spin what happened behind closed doors. That applies to both Ukraine and Russia, each of which has provided its own spin. Finger-pointing about who said what in failed negotiations can be found throughout the diplomatic historiography of negotiations even centuries after all the participants are dead, as anyone who has read any American or European history can tell you. Most of the in-depth reporting on the talks comes from outlets and writers sympathetic to Ukraine, and appears to be based in good part on information provided by anonymous and/or Ukrainian sources. Then again, the same skepticism should be aimed at claims made by Putin or extrapolated from partial quotations from Arakhamia and Nuland.
That said, there is a good deal more to work with here than just anonymous quotes. Lengthy and detailed reportage has been offered in Foreign Affairs in April 2024 by Samuel Charap of the Rand Corporation and Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins; in the New York Times in June 2024 by Anton Troianovski, Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz; and in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in November 2024 by Elizaveta Surnachova (more on that report in English here). The reports included the texts of draft agreements proposed and exchanged during the talks, as well as on-the record statements by Bennett and various Ukrainian diplomats. Even steeply discounting the analysis and spin in these reports, a clear enough picture seems to emerge from the documents and the chronology of how each side reacted.
Sitting Down
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. While Russian forces drove deep into Ukraine from multiple directions and threatened the capital of Kyiv, it became immediately apparent that this was not going to be a cakewalk for Russia, as previous Putin invasions of Georgia and Ukraine had been. Four days into the invasion, on February 28, in a meeting facilitated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (a Russian ally), Russian and Ukrainian diplomats met at one of Lukashenko’s estates near Lyakhavichy in Belarus. In a symbolic twist the Russians may not have enjoyed, Lyakhavichy withstood a failed three-month siege by Russian forces in 1660 that was broken by a Polish relief army. Arakhamia, a key parliamentary ally of Zelensky, led the Ukrainian delegation, while the Russian delegation was headed by Putin deputy Vladimir Medinsky.
The parties began exchanging drafts and talking remotely after these meetings concluded. A subsequent round of talks began in Turkey on March 10, featuring the two sides’ foreign ministers, Dmytro Kuleba and Sergei Lavrov, and continued in Istanbul on March 29. Lukashenko remained involved as a mediator, as did Bennett, who met personally with Putin and recalled reviewing 17 or 18 working drafts of proposed agreements. Drafts were exchanged between March 7 and April 15, but the talks collapsed around the time that Ukraine publicized Russian atrocities at Bucha.
Terms and Conditions
The early Russian demands were, unsurprisingly, extensive. Ukraine was required to recognize the “independence” of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Russia had yet to fully conquer. It was required to reduce its army to 50,000 and sharply limit its weaponry, including limiting the range of its missiles so that they could not reach Crimea. It was asked to pay the costs of restoring infrastructure in Donbas, as if this were reparations for aggressive war. Russia demanded internal changes to Ukrainian laws governing its own country, including the reinstatement of Russian as an official language in the Ukrainian constitution, restoration of privileges and property for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and what Russia calls “denazification” but is actually the repeal of Ukrainian laws against celebration of the Soviet Union. It also required international sanctions to be dropped against Russia — something Ukraine could not deliver on its own.
More striking than the original proposals was what Ukraine, in subsequent drafts (including the so-called “Istanbul communique” of March 29) was willing to agree to — and in a few cases, what Russia was willing to abandon.
Ukrainian negotiators declared that they were willing to accept permanent “neutral” status. That included renouncing joining NATO and barring foreign military presence or exercises within Ukraine. In draft agreements, Ukraine pledged not to develop nuclear weapons. It agreed, at least in principle, to one-sided arms reductions in which the Ukrainian military would be limited, and the Russian military would not (although there remained much dispute about the scale of those reductions). Until late in April, Ukraine was willing to accept treaties that did not return all of its territory from pre-2022, let alone from pre-2014.
Russia backed off on its demands for Ukraine to change its internal laws about language, history, and culture. Perhaps more intriguingly, it also abandoned its early insistence on formalizing Ukrainian acceptance of Russian annexation of Crimea and its port of Sevastopol. By mid-April, Russia was willing to agree to a ten-to-15 year process to resolve the status of Crimea, during which Ukraine pledged not to attempt to retake it. Of course, Russia could afford to be patient; it already controls Crimea, so extending the period of that control makes it ever harder to disturb a fait accompli. Moreover, if Russia planned to go to war again with Ukraine later, it could always revisit that issue then, perhaps even with a Russian-installed government in Kyiv. So, how much of a concession that really was is debatable.
Also perhaps surprisingly, later drafts pledged Russia to support Ukraine’s application to join the European Union. Of course, that, too, is something Russia could not deliver, and which might actually prove economically beneficial to Russia if a Russian-controlled Ukraine could be used as a camel’s nose in the EU tent.
The Breaking Point
Some matters were never resolved. All the way to the end of talks, both sides remained far apart on how much Ukraine should be required to reduce its army, with Ukraine still insisting on a 250,000-man army, and Russia demanding an 85,000-man army. Despite the confidence of the negotiators that they were close to a deal, the lack of agreement on such a significant point bespeaks the lack of trust underlying the talks and the difficulty of overcoming it.
The ultimate sticking point, however, was Ukraine’s insistence on security guarantees, and Russia’s view of how they should work. Ukraine wanted, in exchange for disabling its own capacity for self-defense, more than just Russian promises. It wanted a series of external guarantors (including “possible guarantor states: Great Britain, China, Russia, the United States, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel”) to make explicit pledges in the event of a future attack on Ukraine (meaning, an attack by Russia), such as to enforce a no-fly zone, supply weapons to Ukraine, and send troops. It’s not surprising that Western allies such as Johnson would think that they ought to have a say in a treaty that would literally have committed them in the future to go to war with Russia — and to think that supporting the current war was a lesser commitment.
More dramatically, however, Russia inserted in a later draft a clause that changed the Ukrainian security guarantee proposals so that the guarantors must be unanimous before taking any action to defend Ukraine. The problem: The agreement envisioned Russia as one of the guarantors (and China as likely another). The Ukrainians concluded, and were not dissuaded by the Russians from believing, that this meant that Russia could veto any assistance given to stop another Russian invasion.
That would effectively render the entire agreement a sham, with Ukraine giving away its capacity to meaningfully defend itself and severing itself from any alliances, all in exchange for a guarantee of security that was by its very terms designed to be useless. No wonder that nobody outside of Russia would sign such a deal:
Leaders in Poland — early and strong supporters of Ukraine — feared that Germany or France might try to persuade the Ukrainians to accept Russia’s terms, according to a European diplomat, and wanted to prevent that from happening.
To that end, when Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, met with NATO leaders in Brussels on March 24, he held up the March 17 text, said the diplomat, who was present. “Which of you would sign it?” Mr. Duda asked his counterparts, the diplomat said. None of the NATO leaders spoke up.
No wonder that Johnson, by his own admission, told Zelensky during an April 9 visit that any deal with Putin “would be some victory for him: if you give him anything, he’ll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.” But it seems fairly clear that this was a conclusion the Ukrainians were already reaching on their own.
Peace is not made by promises. It is made by defensible borders, defended by someone capable of holding the line. There simply isn’t a basis for the claim that Ukraine was ever offered a deal with Russia that would have secured that. Ukraine’s Western backers didn’t kill any such deal, but they were also right to demand that no deal commit them to a future war with Russia without their consent. The myth of a lost opportunity for peace is just that: a myth.