Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson denied he sabotaged a peace deal thrashed out in Istanbul in March 2022, The Times reported on January 10.

“This is nothing but total nonsense and Russian propaganda,” he told The Times.

Separately the Wall Street Journal recently reported that in a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 9 in Kyiv shortly after details of the Ukraine March 2022 peace deal were agreed between the Ukrainian and Russian delegations he told the Ukrainian president that he had “concerns” over any potential deal.

“I was a bit worried at that stage. I could not see for the life of me what the deal could be, and I thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid,” he told Wall Street Journal senior correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov, adding that the West would back Ukraine “a thousand percent” if Zelenskiy rejected the peace deal and continue to fight.

Eight people have now confirmed that during the discussions on a potential peace deal hosted in Istanbul in March 2022 a detailed framework deal was thrashed out. Of the eight people, seven of them were members of the talks, including David Arakhamia, who is the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party and led the Ukrainian delegation and also confirmed a workable deal was agreed. The other person who confirmed the deal, but was not at the talks, was White House presidential advisor Fiona Hill, who is US President Joe Biden’s go-to expert on Russian affairs.

Johnson’s trip to Ukraine a few days later that saw the deal collapse two days after his departure has proven to be highly controversial. Ukraine’s highly respected news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda broke the story of the meeting and that Zelenskiy had subsequently rebuffed the Russian peace deal.

Arakhamia said in a later interview that during the Zelenskiy-Johnson talks, Johnson advised Zelenskiy that Ukraine should “not sign anything with [Russia] at all, and let’s just fight”. Russian officials have cited Arakhamia’s interview as evidence that Ukraine is controlled by western “puppet masters”.

 

The waters have become very muddied since the original report in Ukrayinska Pravda and Ukraine’s leadership has denied the importance of the peace talks.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has since denied any deal was agreed in conversation with the Wall Street Journal’s Trofimov, and that the Istanbul meeting was no more than a “conversation” in a report published this January.

Akakhamia has also since walked back his earlier comments that a peace deal was all but agreed in his original interview.

“No peace proposals or peace agreement were possible in February or March 2022. Russia entered Ukraine solely for the sake of seizing territories, killing citizens and overthrowing a democratic government. There were no other goals. The main task of the Ukrainian delegation was obvious: to achieve at least a 24 or 48-hour ceasefire,” he told The Times this week.

Other members of the delegation, including former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and ex-Chancellor Gerhart Schroeder, say a very detailed plan was agreed by both sides, with Ukraine’s return to neutrality as the core element, the details of which have also been confirmed by others from the group of seven people that attended the meetings. These commentators did not mention a ceasefire as a goal of the talks.

According to Schroeder, the deal would have included the following main points:

· Ukraine would abandon its Nato aspirations and re-adopt neutrality;

· The bans on the Russian language in Ukraine would be removed;

· Donbass would remain in Ukraine but as an autonomous region (Schroeder: "Like South Tyrol");

· The United Nations Security Council plus Germany should offer and supervise the security agreements; and

· The Crimea problem would be addressed.

Bennett, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and several others have claimed that the deal collapsed because the “West” blocked it. It remains unclear if the opposition to the deal was driven by the White House or if Brussels played any role.

It also remains unclear exactly what Johnson’s role was: if he is responsible for persuading Zelenskiy that a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin was a bad idea as Russia would be likely to relaunch its attack on Ukraine as soon as it had rearmed; or if Johnson was acting at the behest of the White House, as some have claimed.

The Times and others have since claimed that the reports that a peace deal was agreed is “Kremlin propaganda”.

Putin confirmed there was a deal in June 2022. He showed African leaders at a meeting in St Petersburg what he said was a signed draft agreement between Russia and Ukraine that would have set limits on Kyiv’s armed forces in return for the Kremlin calling off its invasion. Putin added during his annual press conference that the deal had been agreed but was later “chucked away into the stove”.

Lavrov also confirmed the talks' existence in September in his Empire of Lies speech to the UN and said the details of the deal were agreed on by both sides.

However, these comments come well after the original Ukrayinska Pravda report in April 2022 and the subsequent confirmations by Hill and others in the following months.

This week’s Times report typically focuses on Russia’s comments and fails to mention the Ukrayinska Pravda report or the other eight people that have confirmed the deal’s existence at all.

“In recent months Moscow has accused Johnson of vetoing an agreement that it says would have led to Russia withdrawing troops, in exchange for Kyiv abandoning its aspirations to join Nato and pledging neutrality,” The Times said.

The Times went on to report that Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, claimed late last year that Johnson had “ordered” Zelensky not to agree to any peace deals with Moscow.

“Johnson banned Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia following negotiations in Istanbul at the end of March 2022 and demanded the continuation of hostilities against Russia,” she said, as cited by The Times.

While the evidence that a deal was thrashed out, and in great detail, that both sides agreed to in principle, what is not clear is what was said at the Zelenskiy-Johnson meeting on April 9.

Pro-Russia supporters claim that the West warned Zelenskiy off doing a deal as its strategy was to use Ukraine as a proxy to denigrate Russia’s military ability. Moreover, they argue that Johnson intimated that the West would provide all the military support Ukraine needed to win the war.

Pro-Ukraine and the Zelenskiy administration are now denying the deal was ever done, or at least trying to play down the significance of the talks in Istanbul.

A more nuanced view, that has not been confirmed by the limited public comments from Johnson on the contents of his meeting with Zelenskiy, is that the West refused to offer Ukraine bi-lateral security deals in place of eventual Nato membership, and Zelenskiy decided that without those deals doing a peace deal with the mercurial Putin would be too risky, as Russia could relaunch its attack at any time.

“They really hoped almost to the last that they would pressure us into signing an agreement to accept neutrality. This was the most important thing for them to be ready to end the war. If we accepted, as Finland once did, neutrality, and pledged that we will not join Nato,” Arakhamia said in an interview at the end of last year.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the negotiators at the first round of peace talks in Gomel, Belarus, earlier in March just after Russia’s invasion on February 24, had already offered to give up Ukraine’s Nato aspirations and return to its pre-2014 constitutional stance of neutrality. However, the Ukrainian delegation to those talks also suggested that as part of that deal, Kyiv could sign bilateral security deals with the European powers and the US to prevent the risk that Russia would simply relaunch an invasion as soon as it had rearmed.

As the Kremlin’s first priority in the talks was to ensure Ukraine’s neutrality, as confirmed by most of the eight commentators on the deal, as well as prevent Ukraine’s eventual membership of Nato, the Russian delegates in Gomel signalled that this bi-lateral security deal formula was acceptable to the Kremlin.

However, at the time and since then, the West has made few comments on offering Ukraine bi-lateral security deals. The only overt statement on the need for these deals was made by French President Emmanuel Macron in July during the most recent Nato summit in Riga, when he called for the West to offer Ukraine those security deals. However, the other Nato members rejected the proposal out of hand.

The problem with bi-lateral security deals is they would commit Western powers to commit their own troops to a fight in Ukraine and in effect go to war with Russia – something that Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said since the beginning of the conflict Nato members are unwilling to do.

It seems likely that in the April 9 meeting, Johnson promised Zelenskiy significant military aid in its struggle against Russia, but at the same time made it clear that the West was not prepared to sign bi-lateral security deals with Ukraine should Zelenskiy agree a peace deal with Putin.

While the bi-lateral security deals were acceptable to the Kremlin, for the Western powers, those deals would expose them to the need to fight Russia would it attack Ukraine in the same way as allowing Ukraine to join Nato would – and that is a point the West has made abundantly clear: there is no intention of bring Ukraine into the Nato family any time soon, because of the danger it would be drawn into war with Russia.