Russia: Britain Killed Peace in Ukraine in 2022
Ukraine has lost the war, but the military-industrial-complex is winning
Maria Zakharova, the head of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Wednesday that Britain is pretending to play the role of peacemaker now, but made sure to kill any talk of peace in Ukraine in the early stages of the war.
Tass, the Russian news agency, reported that Zakharova made the remarks after being asked about reports indicating that the UK was beginning to lean on Kyiv to negotiate. Publicly, Britain has indicated that it is still behind Ukraine.
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"I have no idea what kind of a negotiating table they are talking about, given that it was British diplomats who knocked it out from under the hands of Kiev negotiators in 2022. "Perhaps by means of such leaks the British authorities are trying to produce an impression they are peacemakers," she said.
Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, and Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings, penned an article in Foreign Affairs that mentions a possible peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the war.
The two, who are deeply connected to the political establishment in Washington, cited “multiple former senior U.S. officials” who told them that it seemed Kyiv and Moscow “have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: 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.”
The two said Russia changed its position on the matter in July, and the new objective is not a settlement, but rather “Ukrainian capitulation.”
There are several mysteries stemming from the war, from the Nord Stream attack to what changed in Kyiv that got Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to scrap the deal.
Responsible Statecraft wrote about the “impact” of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to Ukraine at about the time the peace deal was being floated.
Ukrainska Pravda, a pro-Western newspaper, reported that the peace talks came to a halt after Johnson’s visit. The article stated that “the Russian side…was actually ready for the Zelensky-Putin meeting.”
The report said Johnson arrived in Ukraine “almost without warning” and had two messages.
1: Putin is a war criminal and should be pressured, not negotiated with.
2: Even if Kyiv is ready to sign some agreements, the West has not crossed that bridge.
Since then, the West has only talked about more war and more weapons for Kyiv. Secretary of State Llyod Austin seemed to give a glimpse into Washington’s goals when, in April, he said, “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”