New details have emerged in the last few months about the intensive talks, just weeks after the full Russian invasion of Ukraine, that came very close to ending the war in April 2022 with an ambitious peace agreement negotiated in Istanbul, Turkey.
Both the New York Times (15 June) and Foreign Affairs (on 16 April) have carried out major investigations, with access to the draft agreements shared between the two sides and interviews with figures on both sides and in Western governments.
In Foreign Affairs, Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko highlight ‘a fact that, in retrospect, seems extraordinary: in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.’
They comment that the story of the Istanbul talks is ‘a reminder that Putin and Zelensky were willing to consider extraordinary compromises to end the war’: ‘if and when Kyiv and Moscow return to the negotiating table, they’ll find it littered with ideas that could yet prove useful in building a durable peace.’
It’s not just history.
Charap and Radchenko point out that, on 11 April this year, the Belorussian president Alexander Lukashenko, who played an important role early on in the Russian-Ukrainian peace talks, called for Ukraine to put the draft peace treaty from early 2022 back on the negotiating table. ‘It’s a reasonable position,’ he said in a conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. ‘It includes acceptable terms for Ukraine as well. They agreed to this position.’
Putin added: ‘They agreed. Of course.’
One major diplomatic achievement in the Istanbul talks was to take the heat out of two fiery issues: Crimea and the Donbass.
Russia had invaded and occupied Crimea in 2014, and illegally ‘annexed’ it. Experts agree that holding onto the port is seen in Moscow as a vital national interest. As for Donbass, a guerrilla war has been going on in this eastern region of Ukraine since 2014, with Russian forces supporting armed separatists.
The Istanbul draft agreements parked both issues, leaving Crimea under Russian occupation but without Ukraine accepting it legally, and the situation in Donbass also being left to further negotiation between Russia and Ukraine.
Preconditions
In the New York Times story, published online on 15 June, Anton Troianovski, Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz put more emphasis on what divided the two sides back in April 2022.
They write: ‘Even before Mr. Putin’s latest demand, experts said it was hard to imagine going back to the kind of deal discussed in 2022. Ukraine is more determined than ever to join NATO, a message it will reinforce when leaders of the alliance meet in Washington next month.’
Putin’s ‘latest demand’ is actually a precondition for negotiations: Russia will only order a ceasefire and negotiate after Ukrainian forces have voluntarily withdrawn from the four Ukrainian provinces (‘oblasts’) that Russia has claimed but does not entirely occupy. Also, Ukraine has to publicly give up on the idea of joining NATO.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy correctly described these preconditions as ‘ultimatum messages’.
What he failed to mention was that Russia’s new position is a mirror image of one of the demands in his ‘Ten-Point Peace Formula’: ‘Russia must withdraw all its troops and armed formations from the territory of Ukraine’ including Crimea.
“Putin and Zelensky were willing to consider extraordinary compromises to end the war”
Zelenskyy also failed to mention that his ‘peace formula’ contained several other impossible preconditions or predetermined outcomes for peace negotiations, including war crimes trials for Russian leaders (see PN 2668).
Zelenskyy also failed to mention that Russia has not gone as far in barring the way to negotiations as he has.
Putin has not signed into law a decree banning negotiations with Ukraine until Zelenskyy has been removed from office. On the other hand, on 4 October 2022, Zelenskyy passed decree 679/2022 making it illegal to negotiate with Putin.
Putin has repeatedly praised the draft peace deal reached in Istanbul. Those talks are an important political tool for Russia in winning support, or at least neutrality, from nations in the Global South, as Putin showed in a meeting with African leaders in June 2023 (PN 2668).
It’s not clear whether Putin is seriously interested in going back to the Istanbul terms.
The New York Times reported last December that Putin had been sending messages to the US ‘since at least September [2023] that he is open to a cease-fire that freezes the fighting along the current lines, far short of his ambitions to dominate Ukraine’ (PN 2670).
If this is right, then the latest preconditions language from Putin is not set in stone.
Red line
Back in 2022, both Putin and Zelenskyy made huge compromises. In the draft agreement, Putin signed up to ‘facilitating’ Ukraine’s membership of the European Union.
Charap and Radchenko are rightly amazed: ‘This was nothing short of extraordinary: in 2013, Putin had put intense pressure on Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to back out of a mere association agreement with the EU. Now, Russia was agreeing to “facilitate” Ukraine’s full accession to the EU.’
On Ukraine’s side, they were willing to give up on NATO membership and become a permanently neutral state.
They were going to trade the defence guarantee contained in the NATO charter with a stand-alone treaty guaranteeing that signatories would defend Ukraine militarily if it was ever attacked in the future. The suggested guarantors included France, the UK and the US – and Russia.
While there were minor issues to be ironed out, it seemed that a peace deal had been agreed in principle.
Both the New York Times and Foreign Affairs focus on the moment that Russia put forward an amendment which would have made the guarantees Ukraine was seeking meaningless.
Earlier drafts of the agreement had said that each guarantor would decide by itself whether to take military action to defend Ukraine.
In the last draft that was circulated between the two sides, the word ‘all’ was inserted by Russia (and resisted by Ukraine), meaning that all the guarantor states had to agree – by consensus – to taking military action in support of Ukraine.
The New York Times sums up: ‘In effect, 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.’
If Russia had insisted on this amendment, this would have forced the Ukrainians to walk away from the peace talks.
What neither Foreign Affairs nor the New York Times take into account, however, is that this 15 April draft agreement came three days after Putin had already publicly declared the peace talks were at a ‘dead end’, because of a new position taken by Ukraine.
This must complicate our judgement about the various hardline changes that Russia proposed in the 15 April draft agreement.
Ukraine seems to have already walked away from the deal by this point. One reason was that countries such as the UK and the US had made clear they would not sign up to guaranteeing Ukrainian security. Boris Johnson played a significant role in this, visiting Kyiv in person to deliver his message, as we’ve reported before (PN 2661).
Russia specialist Anatol Lieven has commented recently: ‘it should be remembered that while the Russian terms of March 2022 would... have been a bitter pill for Ukraine to swallow at the time, their acceptance would have saved Ukraine much territory that it now seems certain permanently to lose, much damage that may never be restored, and many human beings who can never be brought back to life.’