Moon of Alabama
US President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace during an unannounced visit in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Feb. 20, 2023.
The Washington Post provides another of those lame flattering portraits of the Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelinski:
A year in the trenches has hardened Ukraine’s president
Volodymyr Zelensky came into office thinking peace with Putin was possible. He now believes victory is the only answer.
The piece is contradicting itself in certain manners but it also provides new evidence that the U.S. had set out to sabotage the Minsk agreement.
The headline is of course wrong. Zelenski has not been in the trenches but continued his pampered life near a bunker in Kiev. It is not Zelenski’s ‘hardening’ that prevents peace negotiations with Russia but the blockage of any negotiation attempts by the U.S. government.
But first a look at the contradiction:
Not long after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a year ago this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky found himself in a safe room beneath Kyiv’s government complex with the voice of the Belarusian president booming over the phone.Alexander Lukashenko, one of the Kremlin’s key allies, was inviting a delegation of officials to Minsk to negotiate an end to the war that Russia had launched just three days earlier, according to Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, who was in the room for the call.
Zelensky was incensed at the invitation to another negotiation — recalling talks over the conflict in Ukraine’s east, known as “Minsk 1” and “Minsk 2,” that took place in the Belarusian capital in 2014 and 2015 — in which Kyiv was forced to make concessions to the Kremlin under the threat of battlefield losses.
“There will be no Minsk,” Zelensky said, according to Sybiha. “There will be no Minsk 3.”
The claim is that Zelenski was rejecting negotiations. But that claim is false and contradicted by the following events. Many paragraphs later we learn:
Zelensky remained adamant that Ukraine would not enter another Minsk-type negotiation with Russia, but emissaries from the Ukrainian government still held talks with the Russians in Belarus and Turkey throughout March, until the discovery of Russian atrocities in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. When Zelensky visited Bucha on April 4, he looked visibly stricken, telling reporters it was “very difficult to talk when you see what they have done here.” Arakhamia said he called the leader of the Russian negotiating team and explained that Ukraine could no longer participate in any negotiations. “How can I fly in and sit down at a table and speak to them?” Arakhamia said. “I simply don’t understand.”
That is fake history. Whatever happened in Bucha did not stop Zelenski from negotiating with Russia. As the BBC reported on April 4 2022:
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.
…
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.”
It was only days later, after a phone call and then a visit by the British prime minister Boris Johnson, that the Ukraine ended the negotiations with Russia. The Ukrainian Pravda reported in May 2022:
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”.
Boris Johnson made his unannounced visit to Kiev on April 9 2022.
The Ukrainian Pravda account has been confirmed by Fiona Hill, Russia specialist in the National Security Council under the Trump administration. In a piece for Foreign Affairs Fiona Hill and Angela Stent wrote in August 2022:
According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.
In an interview with an Israeli outlet (vid), former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennett, who was personally deeply involved in the negotiation process, also alleged that the ‘West’ blocked them:
Reports at the time reflect Bennet’s comments and said Russia and Ukraine were softening their positions. Citing Israeli officials, Axios reported on March 8 that Putin’s “proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”
Discussing how Western leaders felt about his mediation efforts, Bennett said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an “aggressive line” while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were more “pragmatic.” Bennett said President Biden adopted “both” positions.
But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.
When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said,
“Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”
Again, the end of the negotiations between Russian and Ukraine in early April 2022 had nothing to with Bucha, but was caused by ‘Western’, the U.S. and UK’s, unwillingness to support a peace agreement.
Washington’s resistance against any Ukrainian agreement with Russia can also be seen in an anecdote the Washington Post piece provides from Zelenski’s first year as president:
William B. Taylor Jr., the top official at the U.S. Embassy at the time, recalled finding Zelensky in his office in the summer of 2019 expressing curiosity about the “Steinmeier Formula,” an interpretation of the Minsk accords named after Germany’s former foreign minister that the Ukrainian president hoped might lead to a deal with the Kremlin.
“No one knows what it is,” Taylor recalled replying. “Steinmeier doesn’t know what it is.”
Zelensky, according to Taylor, grabbed his phone and pointed to a document explaining the formulation, thinking that somewhere in the details of the legalese a workable compromise with Moscow might be found.
“It’s a terrible idea,” Taylor replied, though Zelensky went on to endorse it in the coming months, trying to land a face-to-face with Putin.
The Steinmeier formula determined the sequencing of the steps the Ukrainian government and the Donbas authorities had to take under the Minsk agreements:
Specifically, Steinmeier’s formula calls for elections to be held in the separatist-held territories under Ukrainian legislation and the supervision of the OSCE. If the OSCE judges the balloting to be free and fair, then a special self-governing status for the territories will be initiated and Ukraine will be returned control of its easternmost border.
The formula was vocalized and had not been put to paper until it was signed on October 1 by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the separatist territories of Luhansk and Donetsk, and the OSCE in Minsk.
It was a simple and clear agreement. But the top U.S. envoy in Ukraine tried to prevent Zelenski from implementing it.
Multiple times along the line of events the Ukraine had tried to come to peace with Russia. Each time we know of the ‘West’, i.e. the U.S. and UK, successfully sabotaged the peace efforts.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 