fact finder
It is repeatedly claimed that Russia and Ukraine negotiated a ceasefire shortly after the Russian invasion. There were actually discussions about it – but no agreement.
“2 years of war, 2 years of suffering, 2 years of destruction. This could all have been prevented!” – Contributions like that of the member of the “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht” (BSW) party, Frederick Broßart, are currently booming again. The thesis: There was already a negotiated ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine – in April 2022, a few weeks after the invasion of Russian troops. However, the West prevented this ceasefire from coming about.
Not only participants in the Ukrainian negotiating delegation have long since contradicted this version, experts also reject it for several reasons. “The crucial point is that there were negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. But there was never a fully negotiated agreement,” says Nico Lange, Ukraine and Russia expert at the Munich Security Conference. Contrary to what Russia and pro-Russian voices often claim, the two countries were still far apart on controversial points.
Negotiations shortly after the Russian invasion
The first negotiations between a Russian and a Ukrainian delegation took place on February 28, 2022, just a few days after the major Russian attack. At that time, Russia demanded an article of the Wall Street Journals the unconditional surrender of Ukraine. In addition, among other things, the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj should be deposed and Russian reintroduced as the official language. This was out of the question for the Ukrainian delegation. In the following days, negotiations focused primarily on the establishment of civilian corridors to enable the evacuation of civilians.
In mid-March, negotiations between the two delegations on a possible peace treaty were intensified again, with Turkey as mediator. On March 29, direct negotiations took place in Istanbul, during which more concrete ideas for a possible ceasefire were worked out by the two delegations.
Ukraine should sign a binding declaration of neutrality and thereby abandon any attempts to join NATO, according to a document that the “World” exists. Accordingly, the document contained, among other things, the sub-point that Ukraine would forego the receipt, production and acquisition of nuclear weapons and would not allow foreign weapons and troops in the country.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Ukrainian negotiators were also prepared to at least freeze the issue of the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in violation of international law.
Russia wanted to make Ukraine virtually defenseless
However, on other points the two delegations were still far apart. There was no agreement on what the Russian-Ukrainian borders should look like with a view to eastern Ukraine. The Russian delegation also called for a dramatic reduction in Ukrainian armed forces and military equipment.
This emerged from a draft that Russia’s Vladimir Putin briefly presented to television cameras last summer as a supposed draft treaty to a delegation of African governments. Among other things, Moscow wanted the Ukrainian army to be limited to 85,000 soldiers and only be allowed to have weapons with a short range.
“Basically, Russia wanted to force Ukraine to surrender,” says Lange. “If Ukraine had done what was written in this Russian draft – it wasn’t a unified draft – then it would have been defenseless against the next Russian attack.”
The draft that Putin held up to the camera was also dated April 15th. However, the last round of negotiations was in Istanbul on March 29th. “After the last meeting in Istanbul, there was no fully negotiated agreement that both sides agreed to,” says Lange. Although the delegations remained in contact, there was no further round of negotiations after that.
Atrocities committed by Butscha came to light
And there was one main reason for this: the atrocities in Bucha, which the Russian army committed in the Kiev suburbs and which came to light at the beginning of April. The Russian occupiers had killed more than 450 civilians within a short period of time. For the Ukrainian government, further negotiations were out of the question from that point on unless Russia had completely withdrawn its troops from the entire territory of Ukraine.
“At that point, Russia still thought that they were standing in front of Kiev, they were winning and they could now dictate everything to Ukraine,” said Lange. “That wouldn’t have been a basis for peace.”
The military situation had also changed in favor of Ukraine at that time. The atrocities in Bucha also became known because the Russian troops had to withdraw. Putin subsequently tried to interpret this withdrawal as a concession, but there is no evidence of this.
point of contention Security guarantees
Another key point of contention in the ceasefire negotiations was security guarantees for Ukraine. Because of the required neutrality and the curtailment of the Ukrainian army, it would have been virtually helpless against another Russian attack. According to the documents, Russia wanted to promise not to attack Ukraine again. However, Russia also had this in 1994 with the so-called Budapest Memorandum promised and later not kept.
That is why the idea arose in the negotiations that a possible agreement between Russia and Ukraine should be guaranteed by other states. The USA, Great Britain, China, France and Russia are named, i.e. the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. These should provide Ukraine with comprehensive security guarantees in order to defend Ukraine’s neutrality if the treaty were violated. However, this plan had several snags.
On the one hand, the Russian delegation demanded that in the event of an attack, all guarantor states must agree to activate the assistance mechanism – including Russia itself. Russia could have prevented this assistance clause, which would have left Ukraine virtually powerless in the event of an attack. “In the event of a Russian attack, Russia could have rejected the security guarantees, which is of course nonsense,” said Lange.
In addition, the Western countries, France, the USA and Great Britain, would probably never have agreed to these security guarantees, says Lange. “These states are simply not prepared, for example, to fight for Ukraine in Ukraine with their own armed forces.” They therefore did not agree to binding security guarantees.
“Perpetrator-victim reversal”
Overall, Lange considers the entire discussion about the ceasefire negotiations to be exaggerated. “If Ukraine had agreed to this Russian draft, it would have been defenseless against the next Russian attack.” Just because Ukraine was willing to talk does not mean that it would have accepted the other side’s positions.
It is part of Russian propaganda to repeatedly rehash these details, which have already been known for a long time, in order to reverse the perpetrator-victim situation. The Kremlin and pro-Russian channels repeatedly claim that Ukraine and the West prevented an agreement. “The perfidious thing is that this story is being turned into a narrative that Ukraine and the West are to blame for the war because there could have been a ceasefire,” said Lange. “And that is a very cynical argument, because Putin alone is responsible for the war.”