America Made Me Do It
Distorted Accounts of the Failure of Ukraine-Russia Negotiations in April 2022
A leader shuts down the free press in his country, murders and jails opposition leaders, declares that countries that have been independent for 30 years are not real countries and should be absorbed by his own, works to control a neighboring country, and when that fails, launches a full-scale invasion. And yet some people tell me this is all the fault of the US, because we have ruthlessly allowing the countries threatened by the dictator to join a military alliance with us to protect themselves.
Here I dissect one particular dubious claim, that Russia would have stopped their invasion last April if only the US had not interfered.
- Opponents of US Aid Say the West Stopped a Ukraine/Russia Deal
I have heard several people claim that Ukraine and Russia were about to come to an agreement to end the war in April 2022 when the US sent the UK Prime Minister to scuttle the deal. This echoes claims made in several outlets on the left and right fringes of the news media.
A headline in commondreams.org reads “Boris Johnson Pressured Zelenskyy to Ditch Peace Talks with Russia: Ukrainian Paper”. The Ron Paul Institute’s article Could the War in Ukraine Have Been Stopped? said that “Boris Johnson… flew to Kyiv to tell…Zelenskyy that the West would not support” a ceasefire. Noam Chomsky, in an interview in Truthout, said that “Johnson at once flew to Kyiv with the message that Ukraine’s Western backers would not support the diplomatic initiative, followed by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.”
Chomsky and the Truthout article’s author explain that the reason for Western opposition to talks was that the US had an “explicitly stated strategy of weakening Russia” so that Putin’s government would be brought “to the point of collapse,” citing a Washington Post news item which supported the first claim but not the second.
Similarly, thepeaceworker.org ascribes to Johnson two reasons for arguing against a negotiated settlement: “Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.”
2. Claims About Western Pressure Come from Two Sources
Claims that Russia was about to make a reasonable compromise which was then nixed by Boris Johnson working on behalf of the US come from two sources. One is the September/October 2022 article in Foreign Affairs by Brookings Institution analysts Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, “The World Putin Wants.” The often-quoted passage from the article is
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.
The other source is Ukrainska Pravda [Ukrainian Truth], an internet newspaper based in Kyiv which does not exactly have a pacifist orientation: “everyone who considers oneself a Ukrainian – in their own land or abroad, endeavors to bring the time of our victory closer.” Some widely-quoted excerpts from a 5 May 2022 article by Roman Romaniuk state
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning.
“Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. 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….” Is how on of Zelnskyy’s close associates summed up.
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. Moreover, there is a chance to “press” him. And the West wants to use it.
3. More Complete Reading of Both Sources Gives a Different Picture
The Foreign Affairs excerpt quoted above makes it appear that Hill and Stent believe that Russia was on the verge of withdrawing from Ukraine before Boris Johnson dropped in to work against peace. That impression evaporates if we also quote the sentence immediately before this excerpt:
Despite calls by some for a negotiated settlement that would involve Ukrainian territorial concessions, Putin seems uninterested in a compromise that would leave Ukraine as a sovereign, independent state–whatever its borders.
Similarly, they continue in the next paragraph with
At any point, negotiations with Russia–if not handled carefully and with continued strong Western support for Ukraine’s defense and security–would merely facilitate an operational pause for Moscow. After a time … Moscow would likely first attempt to take … Black Sea ports with the goal of leaving Ukraine an economically inviable, landlocked country. If he succeeds in that, Putin would launch a renewed assault on Kyiv as well, with the aim of … installing a pro-Moscow puppet government.
The title of the Ukrainska Pravda also suggests a point of view quite different from calls for compromise with Russia: “From Zelenskyy’s ‘surrender’ to Putin’s surrender: how the negotiations with Russia are going.” Rather than claiming that Ukraine was being strong-armed by Western powers eager to use it as a pawn against Russia, the article starts with
The peace talks with Russia are the story of how Ukraine has gone from despair to realising [sic] its own strength and its circle of true allies over 70 days of full-scale war.
According to the Ukrainska Pravda article, Johnson didn’t just argue that Putin should be weakened, but that “Anyway, he will screw everyone over” if they accepted peace guarantees from him. The article points to the Johnson visit as only one of two factors working against negotiations.
The first thing was the revelation of the atrocities, rapes, murders, … indiscriminate bombings and … other war crimes committed by Russian troops …
4. What’s Not in the Reports of Thwarted Negotiations
While the same few excerpts have been repeated many times, the original sources do not give any further information about the negotiations, and I wasn’t able to find anything substantive with internet searches either. What exactly was the deal that both sides were agreeing to? Did both sides interpret the proposal the same way? After tentative acceptance by Russian negotiators, did officials above them (and Putin) also agree to the deal? Negotiations can lead to dozens of proposals that are tentatively accepted and then rejected by both sides. Without knowing the details, it is hard to evaluate how close to a solution the diplomats were.
5. A Peaceful Russia Thwarted by an Aggressive US Does Not Make Sense
Hill and Stent elaborate on their view of negotiations in a Brookings Institution interview from about the same time as their Foreign Affairs article.
Bloch: How would you address the argument … that the United States should open channels of diplomatic communication with Russia with the aim of achieving a cease-fire?
Stent: … we don’t really have any evidence that President Putin and the people around in the Kremlin have any interest in opening such channels…. The idea that somehow the United States and its allies are fanning the flames by providing weapons, I think it belies a reality. It’s true, if the West wasn’t supplying weapons, Ukraine probably would by now already have been defeated. But the Russians have made it clear that what they want — and again, they said this — is the capitulation of Ukraine and its surrender.
Hill: Russians would say that to Ukrainians at the very beginning of the war. We’re sorry this is happening to you. This is between us and the West. When, in actual fact, the Ukrainians are very clear — it’s between us and you. You invaded us and you’ve basically said Ukraine shouldn’t exist. This is a war for liberation of Ukraine after a brutal invasion. What Putin wants us to do is to think that the stakes are too high for everybody and that we should capitulate, as Angela said, and we should negotiate away Ukraine.
In general, it is not necessarily true that the US is the good guy in international conflicts. America claimed to be intervening on behalf of freedom and democracy in Nicaragua in the 80s and Vietnam in the 60s while it was thwarting the will of the majority in the countries we were attacking. It invaded Iraq with thin justification. When Richard Nixon was running for president, he worked to sabotage talks between his own country and North Vietnam to prevent President Johnson hurting Nixon’s campaign by making progress in ending the war.
In the particular case of Russia and Ukraine, however, in a region where Russia has traditionally exerted imperialist power, and where the US has previously had a relatively indirect influence, the narrative that it was the US that backed Russia into a corner is implausible. At every stage in the conflict going back to 2014, it was Russia that escalated and the US and NATO that reacted. Every increase in weapons donations to Ukraine has only come after increased Russian attacks and months of agonized debate. Some in the Biden administration have even appeared to be prematurely pushing Ukraine towards negotiations.
If Ukraine was really at the point of agreement with Russia for a Russian withdrawal, Ukrainian neutrality, and an enforceable promise of protection for Ukraine against future Russian attack, Biden could have taken credit for a tremendous victory which would have helped Democrats in the midterm election.
Russia invaded on 24 February 2022, tried and failed to take the Ukrainian capital, but by late March had taken much of the border area, most of which they retained by late April. Russia has weathered sanctions, humiliation on the battlefield, politically dangerous conscription, and as many as 200,000 casualties in this war. And yet are we to believe that they would have retreated back to the 23 February lines if not for something Boris Johnson whispered in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ear?
Cover photo Twitter Mykhailo Podolyak.