High-ranking U.S. official: Russians were ready, but everything was ruined by one man

High-ranking U.S. official: Russians were ready, but everything was ruined by one man

Referring to her sources, Fiona Hill, former official at the U.S. National Security Council specializing in Russian and European affairs, added that a peace agreement could have been reached as early as April.

Hill, who is a veteran of diplomacy, former senior director of the US National Security Council in charge of Europe and Russia in Donald Trump's administration, claims that the Russians came to the peace talks with good intentions.

"According to multiple former senior US officials we spoke with, in April 2022 Russian and Ukrainian negotiators tentatively agreed on the outline of a negotiated transitional settlement: Russia would withdraw from its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbass and all of Crimea, and in return, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries," the article, co-authored by Hill, states.

Ukraine proposed a peace treaty for neutrality in a draft document it submitted to Russia during talks on March 29 in Istanbul, Turkey. The Russian army announced its withdrawal from some parts of Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill, immediately after it was offered, she further claims.

However, a few days later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Kyiv had discovered evidence of war crimes in the territories abandoned by Russian troops, especially in the town of Bucha. He claimed that the Ukrainian public will not allow him to negotiate with a nation that, according to him, is committing genocide against its people.

Russia said the evidence of war crimes was fabricated and believed Kyiv had used the allegations as an excuse to abandon peace talks and continue fighting in the hope that Western military aid would enable it to win on the battlefield.

According to Russian diplomats, Moscow drafted a formal peace agreement based on Ukrainian proposals and sent it to Kyiv, but never heard back. In May, some Ukrainian media connected the failure of the negotiations with the pressure imposed on Kyiv by the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, writes Russia Today and reminds that the leader of Great Britain publicly opposed the negotiations on the solution to the crisis in Ukraine and called on Kyiv to fight for a stronger position in future negotiations.

Johnson visited Kyiv on April 9, reportedly almost unannounced and with a message for Zelensky that he could not get the deal he wanted from his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. According to the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, he labeled Putin as a war criminal who cannot be trusted and said that "even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they (the West) are not", while security guarantees for a neutral Ukraine of major world powers were the cornerstone of the proposed peace agreement.

Senior Russian officials have repeatedly stated that Moscow is willing to resolve the conflict and warned that the decision to end the negotiations only worsened the final conditions for Ukraine. The leadership in Kyiv has insisted that negotiations can only take place after Russia fully withdraws its troops, including Crimea, which Moscow considers its territory.