Unherd has an interesting interview with Aleksey Arestovich (video version), the former spokesperson of the presidential office of Ukraine. Arestovich has fled from Ukraine to the U.S. after two political prosecutions were opened against him.
He confirms, as a dozen other former and current officials have done, that peace talks held between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022 in Istanbul were very successful:
Q: Do you think that bilateral negotiations between Ukraine and Russia could have worked earlier in the process? There has been a lot of discussion around those early months, March, April, May 2020, there were negotiations in Istanbul.
A: Yeah, I was a member of the Istanbul process, and it was the most profitable agreement we could have done. They concluded there two previous agreements that were extremely dangerous for Ukraine: Minsk one and Minsk two. This agreement even contained the question of Crimea. It took 10 years of discussion, 15 years of discussion on the status of Crimea, and it meant security for the Black Sea. But now — I don’t know. Because mid-agreement in Istanbul we came to Kiev and after Bucha we heard from the President that we had stopped the negotiations. The next meeting was to be on the ninth of April and on the second of April it was declined.
Ukraine rejected the 'most profitable agreement' that it could have had. The question is why. Arestovich makes it seem that the false flag atrocities in Bucha played a decisive role:
Q: So you came back from Istanbul thinking the negotiations had been successful?
A: Yes, completely. We opened the champagne bottle. We had discussed demilitarisation, denazification, issues concerning the Russian language, Russian church and much else. And that month, it was the question of the amount of Ukrainian armed forces in peacetime and President Zelenskyy said, “I could decide this question indirectly with Mr. Putin”. The Istanbul agreements were a protocol of intentions and was 90% prepared for directly meeting with Putin. That was to be the next step of negotiations.
Q: What was the sequence and how did Bucha derail that process?
A: I really do not know. The President was shocked about Bucha. All of us were shocked about Bucha. I was in Bucha on the second day when the Russian forces were repelled. Zelenskyy completely changed face when he came into Bucha and saw what had happened. 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, Zelenskyy and Boris Johnson himself.
I think it was the second of April, and I was in Bucha the next day. The President got in one day later, so it could have been the fourth of April, and the next meeting was to be on ninth of April. So something happened in those five days. But the members of the negotiations group stopped any negotiations. When we asked how it could be restarted, the President said, “somewhere, sometime, but not now”.
Q: So something changed Zelenskyy’s mind?
A: Yes, absolutely. And historians will have to find an answer to what happened.
Arestovich is wrong and we do not need historians to answer that question.
Even after the atrocities in Bucha, which were alleged to have been done by Russian soldiers, President Zelenski was willing to continue negotiations with Russia.
We know that because a BBC reporter had directly asked him about it:
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has said peace talks will continue with Russia despite accusing Moscow of war crimes and genocide.
Mr Zelensky was speaking in Bucha, near the capital Kyiv, where bodies of civilians were found strewn on the streets after Russian troops withdrew.
The shocking videos and photos sparked outrage around the world and calls for further sanctions against Russia.
Without evidence, Russia said images of atrocities had been staged by Ukraine.
Ukraine started a war crimes investigation after it said the bodies of 410 civilians had been found in areas around Kyiv. Some were discovered in mass graves while others had their hands tied and had apparently been shot at close range.
Wearing a bullet-proof vest and surrounded by Ukrainian soldiers, Mr Zelensky said Russian troops had "treated people worse than animals". "That is real genocide, what you have seen here," he said.
Responding to a question from the BBC on whether it was still possible to talk peace with Russia, Mr Zelensky said: "Yes, because Ukraine must have peace. We are in Europe in the 21st Century. We will continue efforts diplomatically and militarily."
There is also an AP interview done on April 9, 2022 in which Zelenski argues for continuing negotiations with Russia:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that he is committed to pressing for peace despite Russian attacks on civilians that have stunned the world, and he renewed his plea for more weapons ahead of an expected surge in fighting in the country’s east.
He made the comments in an interview with The Associated Press a day after at least 52 people were killed in a strike on a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, and as evidence of civilian killings came to light after Russian troops failed to seize the capital where he has hunkered down, Kyiv.
“No one wants to negotiate with a person or people who tortured this nation. It’s all understandable. And as a man, as a father, I understand this very well,” Zelenskyy said. But “we don’t want to lose opportunities, if we have them, for a diplomatic solution.”
The atrocities in Bucha had been done and propagandized by fascist militia who had been sent into the city days after Russian troops had withdrawn. This was likely an attempt to sabotage the negotiations.
But even after Bucha had happened President Zelenski wanted to continue the very successful negotiation which would have essentially led to a third Minsk like agreement very favorable to the Ukrainian side.
On April 9 the British Prime Minister at that time, Boris Johnson, was sent to Kiev to prohibit further negotiations:
Following the arrival of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv, a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin has become less likely.
Source: Ukrainska Pravda article "From Zelenskyy's "Surrender" to Putin's Surrender. How Negotiations with Russia Are Going".
…
Details: According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.
And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.
Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to "press him."
Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine "had turned into a dead end".
Arestovich is wrong in his assertion that the events in Bucha had ended the negotiations. Zelenski was willing to continue that path towards peace but was prohibited to do so by his 'western partners'.
Still the Unherd interview with Alexevich is a very interesting read. Here he touches on the real problem Ukraine has:
Q: So you don’t believe that there is a much stronger Ukrainian nationalism now than there was two years ago? Because by report, the fact of the invasion has brought Ukrainian people together. You’re saying that has not happened?
A: Ukrainian nationalism is the idea of less than 20% of Ukrainians. This is the problem.
Q: What about the remaining 80%?
A: I think for most of them, their idea is of a multinational and poly-cultural country. And when Zelenskyy came into power in 2019, they voted for this idea. He did not articulate it specifically but it was what he meant when he said, “I don’t see a difference in the Ukrainian-Russian language conflict, we are all Ukrainians even if we speak different languages.” And you know, my great criticism of what has happened in Ukraine over the last year, during the emotional trauma of the war, is this idea of Ukrainian nationalism which has divided Ukraine into different people: the Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers as a second class of people. It’s the main dangerous idea and a worse danger than Russian military aggression, because nobody from this 80% of people wants to die for a system in which they are people of a second class.
The 20%, which created violent militia like the Right Sector and the Azov movement, managed to turn Zelenski, by threatening him, from pursuing peaceful relation with Russia, as he had promised during his election campaign, into a hardline western proxy manipulated to 'overextend and unbalance' Russia and 'weakening it' by waging a hopeless war against it.
The 20%, largely from west Ukraine, were first supported by Austria-Hungary empire, then by the German Nazis and then by the CIA and its appendix, the German BND secret service. These interventions from outside powers were designed to instigate a fake Ukrainian nationalism to turn at first against Poland and then against Russia.
A century on this deadly game has not changed.
But Ukraine continues to be a multinational and poli-cultural country and acknowledging and accepting this is the only way for it to survive.