10. Could the Ukraine War Have Been Avoided?
Sorting out competing claims about negotiations before and after the invasion
Mearsheimer and other critics of Western conduct contend that the war could have been avoided, or brought to an early end, if the prospect of Ukraine joining the alliance had been definitively ruled out by the US and the NATO allies, or by Ukraine itself.
This could only be true if there were no other motives for Russian aggression other than the supposed existential fear of NATO. As as discussed in a [companion article], this assumes that concern about NATO was the sole or overwhelmingly predominant motive for the Putin regime’s actions.
Several pieces of evidence have been put forward by those who support this claim. There is the proposal presented by Sergey Lavrov on 17 December 2021 for an agreement between the Russia Federation and NATO that would have banned any further expansion of NATO, including into Ukraine, thereby removing the imperative for the invasion.
However, Lavrov’s proposal had a number of other provisions that would obviously be unacceptable to NATO, in particular the requirement that NATO deploy no forces or weapons in the nations that joined the alliance after May 1997, which would have stripped the fourteen new members, including the tiny Baltic states, of the benefit of collective defence.
This was unacceptable, and clearly designed to be such. The former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, who was a counsellor to the Russian mission to the United Nations and who defected to the West after the 2022 invasion, describes in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine how he and other members of his mission were astounded when they saw the terms of this proposal:
It was bewildering, filled with provisions that would clearly be unacceptable to the West, such as a demand that NATO withdraw all troops and weapons from states that joined after 1997, which would include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic states.
I assumed its author was either laying the groundwork for war or had no idea how the United States or Europe worked—or both. I chatted with our delegates during coffee breaks, and they seemed perplexed as well. I asked my supervisor about it, and he, too, was bewildered.
No one could understand how we would go to the United States with a document that demanded, among other things, that NATO permanently close its door to new members. Eventually, we learned the document’s origin: it came straight from the Kremlin. It was therefore not to be questioned.
So, this was not a serious attempt to resolve the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, some articles on the Putinite blogosphere thought it was hilarious. In a piece in English titled (as you might have guessed) Regathering of the Russian Lands by the enthusiastic supporter of Putin’s war Antonin Karlin, published about a week before the invasion, that predicted the scale, structure and intent of the Russian onslaught with a degree of accuracy that makes one wonder if he had high military sources, Karlin made this observation about Lavrov’s draft (the original of Karlin’s article has been deleted, but you can still find it on the web archive):
Even as the military buildup proceeded apace, Russia forwarded demands to NATO to disavow further expansion (including Ukraine), and to withdraw foreign military forces from the ex-Warsaw Pact states. Regardless of one’s stance on NATO expansion, this is an objectively and patently impossible ultimatum, and the Kremlin clearly designed it to be so (even leaving aside the minor matter of their intended recipient being a country it has labelled as “agreement-incapable”).
More recently, there have been a revival of speculation that a settlement of the Ukraine war could have been achieved in early April 2022. Before discussing this claim, however, it is worth noting that even earlier than this, indeed just days after the start of the invasion, Reuters reported, citing three unnamed sources close to the Kremlin, that Putin’s chief envoy on Ukraine, Dmitry Kozak advised Putin that he had reached an agreement with Zelensky that would satisfy Russia’s demand that Ukraine remain out of NATO.
From the Reuters report:
Two of the three sources said a push to get the deal finalized occurred immediately after Russia's Feb 24 invasion. Within days, Kozak believed he had Ukraine's agreement to the main terms Russia had been seeking and recommended to Putin that he sign an agreement, the sources said.
"After Feb. 24, Kozak was given carte blanche: they gave him the green light; he got the deal. He brought it back and they told him to clear off. Everything was cancelled. Putin simply changed the plan as he went along," said one of the sources close to the Russian leadership.
The third source - who was told about the events by people who were briefed on the discussions between Kozak and Putin - differed on the timing, saying Kozak had proposed the deal to Putin, and had it rejected, just before the invasion. The sources all requested anonymity to share sensitive internal information.
Note the timing. According to the report, this all occurred just days after the invasion began, when the Russians, and just about everyone else, expected a quick collapse in Ukrainian resistance.
So, what could have changed between then and late March and early April, that would have made the Russians more receptive to a ceasefire? The answer to that is obvious: the calamitous failure of the initial stages of the invasion, especially the attempt to take Kyiv.
But back to the speculation about a deal in early April. This was based on an article that appeared in the September/October 2022 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine. The article was authored by two foreign policy experts affiliated with the Brookings Institute, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. From 2017 to 2019, Hill was the Senior Director for Europe and Russia on the US National Security Council (she also figured prominently in hearings for the first Donald Trump impeachment trial).
Here is the article passage the speculation was based on:
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. 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 later accounts, it was widely alleged that this deal, negotiated in Istanbul in the last days of March, was all but concluded until Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv and persuaded the Ukrainians to scotch it. So, the Ukrainians were willing to forego the opportunity to end the destruction and death being inflicted on their country on the say-so of Boris Johnson. Does this seem plausible?
Actually, the deal was already dead by the time Johnson showed up in Kyiv on 9 April 2022. The Russians had already been backpedalling on the possibility of a deal for days. On 7 April Sergey Lavrov accused the Ukrainians of putting forward disruptive new proposals over and above what was agreed in Istanbul. Here is an account from Reuters on 8 April of what had occurred:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Ukraine had presented Moscow with a draft peace deal containing "unacceptable" elements at variance with a previous agreement, comments that Kyiv dismissed as "pure propaganda".
Ukraine's new draft, according to Lavrov, said the status of Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014, should be raised at a meeting between the two countries' presidents. It also said Ukraine could hold military drills with foreign countries without receiving Russia's permission, something Moscow disagrees with.
Even with this supposedly benign agreement, Ukraine would have had to accept the illegal seizure by armed force of a substantial part of its territory, all of which Russia had in two previous agreements acknowledged to be part of the sovereign territory of Ukraine, in exchange for which Ukraine had surrendered all of the 1,800 Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The second point Lavrov complains about is the ability of Ukraine to conduct military exercises with nations that agreed to guarantee the outcome of the deal. He is upset about “the possibility of holding such exercises if the majority of guarantor countries authorize it.”
As was made clear in December 2023 in an interview with the head of the Ukrainian delegation at the Istanbul talks, David Arakhamia, Ukraine was concerned about the possibility of an agreement that leads to a ceasefire, only for Russia to resume the attack later. A key element that Ukraine was insistent on was meaningful guarantees against this possibility, indeed something similar in effect to the Article 5 provision in the NATO treaty, provided by a number of guarantor nations—and such guarantees were not available.
Recall that, at the time of these negotiations, Russia had just suffered a crushing defeat of its attempt to take Kyiv. Could the Russians be trusted not to use a ceasefire as an opportunity to reconstitute their forces and come storming back later, especially given their track record of abrogating such guarantees in the past?
On 22 March, Ukrainian forces launched a successful counter-offensive resulting in the recapture of the entire Kyiv region, followed by the withdrawal of Russian forces from the vicinity. Russia tried to spin this as a goodwill gesture linked to the peace talks, but the Ukrainians saw it differently. According to Arakhamia:
We did not and still do not trust the Russians to keep their word. This would only have been possible if we had security guarantees. We couldn’t sign something, walk away, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and then Russia would invade, only more prepared this time — because the first time they invaded, they were actually unprepared for us to resist so much. So we could only work with them if we were 100 percent confident that this wouldn’t happen a second time. And we don’t have that confidence.
Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all, and that we should just fight. He added that the U.K. and Ukraine’s other Western partners were informed about the negotiations and the proposed agreements but that they didn’t make any decisions for Kyiv, giving only advice.
There has been a good deal of back-and-forth about exactly what happened in these negotiations, what exactly led the talks to breakdown, and the role played by Johnson. Mearsheimer, Tucker Carlson and other Putin apologists continue to this day to assert that a viable peace agreement was on the table in April 2022, only to be scotched by Ukraine after being told to do so by Boris Johnson, with the background connivance of the United States.
Putin himself, in his 14 June 2024 statement discussed in the introduction, said the same thing. He claims the “negotiating pressure” applied by his advance on Kyiv in February-March had been successful, and that:
… as a result, agreements that satisfied boy Moscow and Kiev were indeed reached. These agreements were put on paper and initialled in Istanbul by the head of the Ukrainian negotiating delegation. This means that this solution was suitable for the Kiev authorities.
The document was titled “Agreement on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine.” It was a compromise, but its key points were in line with our fundamental demands and resolved the problems that were stated as major ones even at the start of the military operation. Let me also note that this included demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine.
In addition, in exchange for international security guarantees, Ukraine would have limited the size of its armed forces, undertaken obligations not to join military alliances, not to host foreign military bases, not to station them and contingents, and not to conduct military exercises on its territory. Everything was written on paper.
Russia, which also understood Ukraine’s security concerns, agreed that Ukraine would receive guarantees similar to those that NATO members enjoy without formally joining the alliance. It was a difficult decision for us, but we recognized the legitimacy of Ukraine’s demands to ensure its security and did not object to the wording proposed by Kiev. This was the wording proposed by Kiev, and we generally did not have any objections, understanding that the main thing was to cease the bloodshed and war in Donbass.
On March 29, 2022, we withdrew our troops from Kiev because we were assured that conditions must be created to complete the political negotiation process, and that one of the parties cannot sign such agreements, as our Western colleagues said, with a gun to their head. Okay, we agreed to that, too.
However, the very next day after the Russian troops were withdrawn from Kiev, the Ukrainian leadership suspended its participation in the negotiations staging the famous provocation in Bucha and rejected the prepared version of the agreements. As we know, it was done on orders from Western curators, including the former UK Prime Minister.
This account by Putin is utterly dishonest. As discussed [in a companion article], the claim that the Russian advance towards Kyiv was a mere negotiating tactic, is preposterous—there is overwhelming evidence that Russia’s intent was to depose the democratically elected Ukrainian government and replace it with a puppet regime.
Putin’s account of the March/April negotiations is also false. As Ukrainian head negotiator David Arakhamia said, the main sticking point was the failure to reach agreement on arrangements that would guarantee Ukraine against a resumption of Russian attacks in future.
Thanks to a major investigative report by the New York Times, we no longer have to speculate about this. The Times obtained copies of the draft agreement, and what proved to be the disputed issues.
Ukraine was understandably, and rightly, insisting on something with a lot more teeth than paper undertakings by Russia to respect its sovereignty. It already had such undertakings, and Russia had flouted them. They wanted something comparable in strength to Article 5 of the NATO treaty.
A proposal was developed that a group of guarantor nations would provide such a guarantee. The proposed members of the guarantor group would be Britain, China, Russia, the United States, and France. There was disagreement between Russia and Ukraine about one additional member—the Russians wanted Belarus, the Ukrainians Turkey.
The key provision was in Article 5 of the draft agreement, which had wording that deliberately partly mirrored Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. In the event of an armed attack on Ukraine, the guarantor states would hold urgent and immediate consultations, and if appropriate provide assistance to Ukraine, including the use of armed force, if requested by Ukraine. Ukraine wanted the measures to include closing the airspace over Ukraine, and providing weaponry, both of which Russia rejected.
But here was the deal-breaker. According to the Times article, when the Russians presented their version of the final draft:
To the Ukrainians’ dismay, there was a crucial departure from what Ukrainian negotiators said was discussed in Istanbul. Russia inserted a clause saying that all guarantor states, including Russia, had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked. In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition that Kyiv quickly identified as a dealbreaker.
It is hard to conceive of an adjective that adequately captures how cynical and preposterous this move was. The aggressor nation, Russia, was insisting on an effective veto on any measures by the guarantors to protect Ukraine should it decide to attack it in future!
And what was Russia doing on the list of guarantor nations anyway? Russia was the problem, the entity Ukraine needed to be protected against. It would be like having Nazi Germany as a guarantor of the territorial integrity of Poland in 1939!
As a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team told the Times, with that change “we had no interest in continuing the talks.”
Putin, of course, neglects to mention this minor detail. But there was more. The Russian version of the draft agreement would prohibit Ukraine from conducting military exercises with the participation of foreign forces without the approval of all the guarantor states—another Russian veto.
And it would set limits on the size and capabilities of Ukraine’s armed forces, such limits being set out in an annex to the agreement. Ukraine agreed to this, in principle, but would not accept the limitations proposed by Russia. Russia wanted the number of personnel in the Ukraine forces limited to 85,000 people, while Ukraine wanted 250,000. All categories of weapons were likewise to be subject to limitations, about which the two sides disagreed. Russia wanted Ukraine limited to 342 tanks, Ukraine wanted 800.
With no restrictions on the size of Russia’s forces, and stringent and, in the circumstances, very low limits on Ukraine’s, this would amount to unilateral disarmament by Ukraine.
That is why the negotiations broke down. Russia wanted Ukraine to be rendered effectively helpless should it decide to resume its aggression at some future time of its choosing. Ukraine rejected this, for very good reason.
In effect, whatever one thinks of Johnson’s advice, all he really did was confirm a decision the Ukrainians had already taken in Istanbul, for entirely understandable reasons.
In any case, as Fiona Hill points out in the Foreign Affairs article that started speculation about this agreement:
… as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July 2022 interview with his country’s state media, this compromise is no longer an option. Even giving Russia all of the Donbas is not enough. “Now the geography is different,” Lavrov asserted, in describing Russia’s short-term military aims. “It’s also Kherson and the Zaporizhzhya regions and a number of other territories.” The goal is not negotiation, but Ukrainian capitulation.
She adds, referring to Putin’s imperial aspirations:
As he looks toward a quarter century in power, Putin seeks to build his version of a Russian empire. He is “gathering in the lands” as did his personal icons—the great Russian tsars—and overturning the legacy of Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the post–Cold War settlement. In this way, Putin wants Russia to be the one exception to the inexorable rise and fall of imperial states. In the twentieth century, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I. Britain and France reluctantly gave up their empires after World War II. But Putin is insistent on bringing tsarist Russia back.
Gathering the Russian lands, again. This, not fear of NATO, is the main driver of Russian revanchism.
Summing up, even if a ceasefire based on terms that would allow Ukraine to survive, albeit stripped of a large chunk of its sovereign territory, was achievable in early April, when Russia’s military situation was dire, the key concern of the Ukrainians was its permanency.
Would it stick, or would it just provide the Russians with a respite to regather their forces and resume the attack at a later time, as feared by the chief Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia? The Ukrainians wanted meaningful safeguards against this possibility, not empty assurances from the Russians of the kind they had already flouted repeatedly.
The Ukrainians spoke of something “along the lines” of Article 5 of the NATO Charter, and this was not forthcoming. To reiterate: in 1994 the Ukrainians had given up their stock of Soviet nuclear weapons in exchange for what proved to be hollow Russian assurances of their territorial integrity. The Ukrainians reached this conclusion on their own, before Boris Johnson showed up in Kyiv on 9 April.
What is truly perverse about the way this issue is treated by Professor Mearsheimer, Tucker Carlson and other Putin apologists in the West is that they talk as if this episode somehow flips the moral responsibility for continuation of the war from the Russian aggressors to the Ukrainian victim and its allies, when the reality is that the Russian army had no legitimate right to be on the soil of Ukraine in the first place.