Dmytro Kuleba denied contested reports that Ukraine had struck a peace deal with Russia in March 2022, Ukraine’s Defence Minister told Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov, according to an extract the paper published on January 7 from Trofimov’s upcoming book Our Enemies Will Vanish.

Kuleba doesn’t deny there were peace talks that March, but denies reports that a deal was agreed, if not signed.

“There was no deal,” Kuleba told Trofimov. “To engage in a conversation and to commit yourself to something are completely different things.”

The existence of a deal struck at the end of March, brokered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, and first reported by Ukrainska Pravda, has proved a controversial story.

Bankova has hotly denied the deal was done, whereas, as reported by bne IntelliNews, eight members of the delegation to Turkey have confirmed that a detailed deal was agreed, only to be abandoned by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in early April after a meeting with the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv.

Amongst the people that have confirmed the deal was agreed are Fiona Hill, Russia expert and advisor to the White House, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, all of whom were participants in the talks.

More recently, Ukrainian politician and presidential advisor David Arakhamia and Ukraine’s former US Ambassador Valeriy Chalyi, the eighth member of the delegation to comment, admitted a deal was all but done, Arakhamia and Chalyi were the official representatives of Bankova at the talks.

"We concluded the Istanbul Communique and were very close in... April to finalise our war with some peaceful settlement," Chalyi said in the most recent comments on the deal in an interview in December. “Putin tried everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine." He added that it was Putin's "personal decision to accept the text of this communique” that outlined a deal.

Schroeder gave a detailed breakdown of the terms that were initialled by both sides, even if the final deal was not accepted. According to Schroeder, the deal would have included the following main points:

· Ukraine would abandon its Nato aspirations;

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

· Donbas 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.

However, Kuleba has denied that this deal came that close to being done, even though Trofimov reported in his article that the first days of April the delegates to the meeting that were negotiating with Putin’s advisor Vladimir Medinsky were “fine tuning” the details of the deal, just as the news of the Russian massacre of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha emerged.

Zelenskiy travelled to Bucha, where he appeared ashen-faced in the face of the atrocity. “The essence of evil has come to our land – murderers, torturers, rapists and looters who call themselves an army,” he said in an address to Ukrainians. “They have killed consciously and with pleasure,” Trofimov reports.

However, the same day when asked by a journalist accompanying Zelenskiy to Bucha if the peace deal was still on, he said: “Yes. What choice do I have?”

A few days later on April 9 Johnson arrived in Kyiv and the deal was abandoned after that meeting, the contents of which remain hazy.

News of the deal was originally reported by Ukrainska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s most reliable news outlets, which also reported that Johnson was the instrument that stopped the deal going through.

“I was a bit worried at that stage,” Trofimov reports Johnson recalling. “I could not see for the life of me what the deal could be, and I thought any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.”

Johnson went on to tell Zelenskiy and said: “it is not for me to tell you what your war objectives can be, but as far as I am concerned, Putin must fail and Ukraine must be entitled to retain full sovereignty and independence. We’re not directly fighting, you are. It’s the Ukrainians that are fighting and dying. But we would back Ukraine a thousand percent.”

These Johnson comments shed no light on allegations that the EU and US put pressure on Ukraine to abandon the Russian peace deal and continue fighting. Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett claimed explicitly that the West had blocked a potential peace deal in an interview posted to his YouTube channel in February last year. Bennett said of the US and its European allies: “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong,” speaking of the efforts to end the war in March and April.

Trofimov cited a single unnamed US official as denying the West had played any role. “Utter bulls,” a senior Biden administration official told Trofimov in an interview. “I know for a fact the United States didn’t pull the plug on that. We were watching it carefully.”

Kuleba’s denial comes on top of Bankova’s denials that a deal was done, but the evidence from the eight members of the delegation that some sort of very specific deal was worked out in some detail are now overwhelming.

What remains unclear is exactly what role Johnson played in undoing the deal and if he was acting on his own or at the behest of the US, as several reports claim. Even Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was unclear on this point in his Empire of Lies speech to the UN in September, when he also confirmed that a deal was almost struck with Ukraine to end the war in March 2022.

"In March and April 2022 there were negotiations [on a peace deal], everything was already initialised. But two days later there was [the Bucha massacre], because, I think, someone in London or Washington does not want this war to end," Lavrov said. "That is why now, when we hear about negotiations, Putin commented on it, he said very clearly: yes, we are ready for negotiations, but we will not consider any proposals for a ceasefire, because we’ve considered it once, but you deceived us," Lavrov said.

What is also unclear is whether Zelenskiy decided to end the negotiations over the deal on his own volition thanks to a combination of Johnson’s offer of significant military support coupled with the horror of the Bucha massacre, or if he was forced into that decision by the West, as some have claimed that Johnson threatened that the West would withdraw its support if Ukraine stopped fighting.