The end of February will mark the fourth year since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, which led to numerous casualties and destruction between the two once fraternal peoples. In this regard, a rhetorical question arises: was it possible to avoid a military conflict and resolve interstate problems with Ukraine through peaceful diplomatic means? If we look at these issues in retrospect, especially when many classified facts have now become known, we can unequivocally conclude that in those political realities three years ago and taking into account the approaches of Kiev and its Western partners to solving the problems of Donbass and Lugansk without serious damage to Russia’s national interests, it was not deemed possible to do this peacefully.
This becomes clear if we study the chronology of the development of events and assess the real steps of the external and internal Ukrainian forces involved in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. After the overthrow of the legitimately elected President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, in February 2014 as a result of a coup d’etat organized by the opposition and supported by the West, a national radical junta led by Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (the country’s parliament) Turchynov came to power, which immediately announced the start of a “counter-terrorism operation” against the population of Donetsk and Lugansk regions who did not support the coup d’etat in Kiev. All this led to bloody clashes between the Ukrainian army and the spontaneously created militia units of Donbass and Lugansk region, supported by volunteers from Russia.
That was also when, after a series of catastrophic defeats of the Ukrainian army in 2014 and in order to resolve the conflict peacefully with the participation of representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the OSCE and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, the months-long work of the Special Contact Group in Minsk began. As a result of its work, in February 2015, a package of measures was signed to implement the Minsk agreements, which included 13 points, including a ceasefire, an ‘all-for-all’ prisoner exchange, a general amnesty for all parties to the conflict, a ban on the use of heavy weapons, and Kiev’s commitment to adopt a law on the special status of Donetsk and Lugansk regions and on holding free elections in these regions under international control. At the same time, Minsk hosted a meeting in the “Normandy Format” of the leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine (newly elected President Petro Poroshenko), who with their declaration supported the Minsk agreements signed by the Contact Group.
However, over the next seven years, only one point of the package – on the prisoner exchange – was fulfilled, and the fulfillment of the remaining obligations was openly sabotaged by the Ukrainian side. In December 2022, in an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that she was aware of Kiev’s unwillingness to fulfill its obligations under the Minsk agreements and considered them herself “as an attempt to give Ukraine time to become stronger.”
Former French President Hollande supported Merkel, saying that Ukraine was able to strengthen “its military positions” thanks to the Minsk agreements. After learning about these interviews, President Putin said that the Western partners turned out to be insincere and simply “led us by the nose” and were not going to fulfill the Minsk agreements. In his opinion, these actions by Western partners only show that Moscow was right to make the difficult decision to launch its Special Military Operation.
To prevent an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine and permanently exclude the possibility of its accession to NATO, at Moscow’s initiative, in December 2021, at a meeting with the-then US President Biden in Geneva, Vladimir Putin proposed draft agreements on Russian security guarantees, which included specific measures to improve relations with the North Atlantic Alliance.
Biden then was explained why the expansion of NATO to the East is imperative for Moscow, as well as why the Alliance should abandon the “development of territories” of countries that joined the bloc after 1997. In response, the American side rejected all Russian proposals and stated that “they will not allow anyone to close the doors to NATO for countries wishing to join the Alliance.” Then another opportunity was missed to avoid conflict with the West over Ukraine.
The third attempt was in February 2022, on the eve of the start of the Special Military Operation, when the Ukrainian side was asked to withdraw all its troops from the occupied parts of the territories of the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) and LPR (Lugansk People’s Republic) to avoid the outbreak of hostilities. However, Kiev refused to discuss the Russian proposal.
At that time, according to Russian intelligence, it became known that Ukraine was preparing a large-scale offensive by forces of a hundred thousand troops stationed on the border with the DPR in order to defeat the Donetsk militia, capture Donetsk and advance to the Russian border. The operation was planned for early March 2022 and could have led to a massacre of the local population and their escape to Russia. All this forced Moscow to take urgent military measures to protect the Russian-speaking population of Donbass and Lugansk regions from physical annihilation.
The only thing that Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin regretted in his recent TV interview was that the Special Military Operation should have been “started earlier and prepared for it better.”
The last opportunity to stop the outbreak of armed conflict appeared when Russian troops advanced from the north within 20 km to Kiev and the Kiev regime, realizing the danger of its position, urgently requested negotiations from Moscow.
The negotiations took place in several stages – first in Minsk and then in Istanbul, as a result of which it was possible to agree on the text of a joint agreement that provided for Ukraine’s commitment to “maintain permanent neutrality”, i.e. refusal to join NATO, refusal to deploy foreign military bases on its territory, refrain from conducting joint military exercises with foreign participation and not provide its own infrastructure (ports, airfields) to other countries, establish the nuclear-weapon-free status of Ukraine and legally prohibit the concepts of “fascism” and “Nazism”, etc.
A special annex was attached to this agreement, which determined the future number of personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the permitted number and range of military equipment and weapons. Both documents were initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Arakhamia.
At that moment, according to President Putin, the heads of a number of European states appealed to him with a request to withdraw Russian troops from near Kiev, arguing that “you can’t sign a peace treaty with a gun to your head.” To prevent further bloodshed and escalation of the conflict, at the end of March 2022, Russian troops began their withdrawal to their territory. And as soon as the troops withdrew from their positions and the danger to Kiev was eliminated, the Kiev leadership immediately withdrew its signature under the Istanbul agreements and declared its firm determination to fight “aggressive Russia” on the battlefield.
Arakhamia later admitted in an interview with Western media that the Istanbul agreements could have become the basis for resolving the armed conflict, but former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to Kiev as a representative of the West and was able to “convince” Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky to reject the Istanbul treaty “as not meeting the interests of Ukraine and Europe” and urged him to continue fighting to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia. For his part, Johnson promised political support from the West and massive financial, economic, and military-technical assistance.
After the success of the negotiations in Istanbul, Moscow did not rule out that Kiev could cheat and nevertheless decided to withdraw troops without waiting for the official ratification of the Istanbul agreements, as is customary in international diplomatic practice. Apparently, Moscow underestimated the extent to which Zelensky depends on the United States and NATO in developing a national foreign policy line and did not take into account the West’s desire to “punish” Russia for allegedly “unprovoked aggression” against a European country. Thus, the last real chance for a peaceful resolution of the conflict was missed.
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