‘Former-UK PM Johnson aborted pact’
-: R Muthu Kumar :-
The recent meeting on Ukraine held in Davos can be described as a failure for Kyiv and its US lead NATO backers.
“On January 14, the fourth meeting on Ukraine in the ‘Copenhagen format’ was held in Davos, Switzerland… The result of the meeting, apart from a ‘family’ photograph of the participants and an agreement on possible new meetings, turned out to be a failure for Kyiv and its Western partners again,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
As the Ukraine-Russia conflict continues and enters the second year, the chances of the conflict ending soon seems to be an elusive myth. And more over, currently there is no basis for peace talks with Ukraine as such negotiations are ‘not relevant’. Ukraine seems to show no inclination for the pinprick to global peace to recede.
In October last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree making Ukraine talks with Russia “impossible”. Zelensky’s “peace formula” had flaws as it was seeking peace without participation from Russia.
Ukraine had a chance to ensure a peace pact at the 2022 Istanbul talks President Vladimir Zelensky somehow changed his mind in the last minute, according to a recent interview by his former aide, Aleksey Arestovich.
Freddie Sayers, editor-in-chief of British outlet UnHerd, interviewed Arestovich almost a year after Ukraine’s top spin doctor left Zelensky’s service. He has since moved to the US, saying that Kyiv wanted him arrested on politically trumped-up charges.
“I was a member of the Istanbul process, and it was the most profitable agreement we could have done,” Arestovich told Sayers. The Ukrainian delegation “opened the champagne bottle” when they came back to Kyiv, believing the agreement was a done deal, he added. The protocols were “90% prepared” for a direct meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Arestovich, when Zelensky called off the talks.
His rejection of the talks has been widely attributed to the ‘Bucha massacre’, which Ukraine accused Russia of, but Arestovich said he did not know that for a fact. Something “absolutely” changed Zelensky’s mind and “historians will have to find an answer to what happened”, Arestovich said.
“A lot of people say it was the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who came to Kiev and put a stop to this negotiation with Russia. I don’t know exactly if that is true or false. He came to Kiev, but nobody knows what they spoke about except, I think, Zelensky and Boris Johnson himself,” he told UnHerd.
Johnson’s role in scuttling the Istanbul peace talks was reported as early as May 2022 by the outlet Ukrainska Pravda. According to the outlet, he came to Kyiv with “two simple messages”, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a war criminal” who should not be negotiated with, and that even if Ukraine was ready to sign some kind of agreement with Russia, the West was not.
Many in UK have started to question, “You do know we were involved in bloody and unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And you explain how British soldiers killed in Helmand or in Basra were at all beneficiaries of this so-called era of the peace dividend?”
David Arakhamia, the leader of Zelensky’s party in the Ukrainian Parliament, brought up the visit in a November 2023 interview, paraphrasing Johnson’s message as telling the Ukrainians “let’s just continue fighting”.
The former British PM finally commented on the matter last week, saying he merely told Zelensky the UK would support Ukraine “a thousand percent” and that any potential agreement with Russia would be “pretty sordid”. He insisted he did not “order” anyone to do anything, however.
According to Arestovich, the conflict has now evolved beyond Russia and Ukraine, pitting the collective West against the ‘Global South’.
“We have to negotiate for an all-new security system for Europe, taking into account all sides of this problem,” he told UnHerd, adding that NATO would need to discuss with Russia “what it would take to guarantee not to use military force in Europe to decide political questions.”
“I should perhaps add that I am absolutely pessimistic that this will happen. I think we face ten or 15 years of war in Europe,” Arestovich said.
Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also had accused the UK of sinking chances of a peace formula in 2022 when it pressured Ukraine to refuse to agree to a draft deal which was drawn up shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine.
A truly comprehensive, fair and sustainable peace settlement is possible only by returning Ukraine to the origins of its statehood – a neutral, non-aligned and nuclear-free status with full respect for the rights and freedoms of citizens of all nationalities living on its territory.
