On June 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered a “40-day influence operation” involving the use of drones to hit targets deep inside Russia. The goal, according to Zelensky, was to compel Russia “to end the war” and to restart negotiations from a position favorable to Ukraine.
It does not appear to have succeeded. In fact, over this period, Russia was able to exploit three Ukrainian weaknesses to strengthen its position
The first is Ukraine’s dangerous shortage of manpower, which has left gaps in the lines protecting the cities of the country’s “fortress belt.” Over the summer, Russia has steadily advanced toward these, including perhaps taking the important city of Konstantinovka. If it falls, or has fallen, a similar fate likely awaits the next cities in the belt.
Matching this shortage of manpower is a shortage of air defense munitions. Ukraine’s supply of Patriot interceptors is at, or approaching, zero, and Russian ballistic and hypersonic missiles seem now to be hitting targets in Ukraine at will. The U.S. has none to give them. On a single day of combat in Iran, the U.S. can go through 50 Patriot interceptors. It has used hundreds of Patriots and may have fewer than 800 left. Ukraine no longer reports how many Russian missiles they shot down. There is nothing to report: the interception rate is approaching zero. Ukraine is losing the long-range war, particularly since the damage done by Ukrainian drones is significantly smaller than the damage done by Russian missiles.
The third weakness is Ukraine’s problems shooting down, not only Russian missiles, but Russian drones. Russia’s new jet-powered model of their Geren drone reaches speeds that far outpace Ukraine’s interceptor drones. These drone-cruise missile hybrids are wreaking havoc on Odessa’s port, making it difficult for weapons to get into Ukraine and for agricultural and mining products to get out.
Losing the air war, the land war, and the economic war makes it look as though Ukraine, not Russia, will be the first to fold and come back to the negotiating table. The tragic part is that the offer that will be on the table this time may well be worse for Ukraine than the peace that was possible in the first months of the war. Ukraine was willing to negotiate peace on favorable terms in the spring of 2022 (indeed, it was Ukrainian negotiators who drafted them). But the U.S. and the UK pushed Ukraine off the path of negotiations and further down the path of war.
Oleksiy Arestovych, who was a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, said in 2024 that the agreement reached in Istanbul “was 90 percent prepared.” The head of Ukraine’s negotiating team, Davyd Arakhamia, offered a similar evaluation: Russia was “prepared to end the war if we… committed that we would not join NATO.” The talks, he said, were an “8 points out of 10” on the success scale. A third member of the team, Oleksandr Chalyi, said the two sides “were very close in… April to finaliz[ing] our war with some peaceful settlement.” “It was,” Arestovych said, “the most profitable agreement we could have done.”
What follows is a comprehensive catalogue of primary and important secondary source testimony that the U.S. and Britain pushed Ukraine not to finalize that agreement.
Secondary sources are obviously less compelling than primary sources, relying as they do on the testimony of people who were not there. But a few deserve mention because of the positions they occupied. Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel said that Boris Johnson “influenced the decision” to terminate negotiations. The former undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, who was the point person on the Obama State Department’s Ukraine policy at the time of the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, said that the Istanbul negotiations fell apart when “people outside Ukraine” questioned the agreement. Slovak prime minister Robert Fico said, “It is proven that at the very beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the West did not allow the Ukrainians to conclude a ceasefire on fair terms on at least two very promising occasions.” And then-Senator J.D. Vance told the Senate that, “as multiple people, both critics of Vladimir Putin and supporters of Ukraine, have pointed out, there was, in fact, a peace deal on the table… And what happened to it? The Biden administration pushed Zelensky to set aside the peace agreement.”
Reporting by Ukrainska Pravda first revealed that Boris Johnson rushed to Kiev to tell Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “the West was not.” In The Russo-Ukrainian War: Follies of Empire, Richard Sakwa reports a previous phone call in which Johnson told Zelensky that the UK “would not stand as a guarantor power and urged Zelensky to refuse the deal.” That, Sakwa said, was also “the position adopted by Western leaders (Johnson, Biden, Scholz, Macron, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi) in a collective phone call on March 29, the day of the Istanbul talks.” A senior government source told The Times that Britain warned Zelensky not to be bullied into concessions and that it was the position of the UK that he shouldn’t be “too eager… to settle” and that “Ukraine needs to be in the strongest possible position militarily before those talks can take place.”
Even greater weight must be given to the nine primary sources who were part of the Ukrainian negotiating team, mediators, or consultants.
Arakhamia confirmed that when the Ukrainian team “returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” He adds that the West “actually advised us not to go into ephemeral security guarantees.”
Arestovych said the West ended the talks because they had already decided to use Ukraine as a trap to fight Russia.
Chalyi made it clear that security guarantees would be coming Ukraine’s way only if they walked away from the Istanbul negotiations. “In mid-April 2022… the leaders of the United States and Great Britain declared that it was unacceptable for their states to participate in the multilateral Treaty on Security Guarantees for Ukraine together with the Russian Federation. At the same time, they assured that they were ready to give security guarantees to Ukraine independently or in a multilateral format without the participation of the Russian Federation.”
Then-Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett was invited by Zelensky to act as mediator. He said that “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire,” but the West “blocked it.” According to Bennett, “a ceasefire was within reach at the time, with both sides prepared to make significant concessions. However, Great Britain and the USA, in particular, ended the process and opted for a continuation of the war.” (Though Bennett later walked back some of these claims, saying in 2023 that it was “unsure there was any deal to be made.”)
The former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was also asked to mediate by Zelensky. He said, “the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed…. Everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal.”
Jean-Daniel Ruch, Swiss ambassador to Turkey during the talks, was in Turkey at the time to consult on the idea of neutrality for Ukraine. He, too, said “the West pulled the plug on the negotiations that were on the edge of leading to a ceasefire…. We had a ceasefire close at hand, and then it’s the Americans, with their British allies, who said no.”
Turkish officials who were hosting the talks also confirm that the West discouraged the talks. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that the talks were on course to end the war, but that “there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia get weaker.” The deputy chairman of Turkey’s governing party, Numan Kurtulmuş, reports that “The United States sees the prolongation of the war as its interest…. There are those who want this war to continue…. Putin [and] Zelensky [were] going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.”
Perhaps most decisively, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, referring to a reference by Putin to Arakhamia’s testimony, said, “there is sincerity in these statements of Mr. Putin, to put it bluntly. We have taken all sincere steps in these talks, which we will call the Istanbul process…. We worked together before former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK withdrew his hand from the peace efforts.”
With Russia continuing to make advances in the war, it seems clear that Ukraine will eventually be forced back to the negotiating table. It is likely to get a worse deal than the one it was pushed to abandon four years ago. And since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or injured, millions have left or been displaced, the economy, environment, and infrastructure have been devastated, and land has been lost. It is time to apologize to Ukrainians for pushing them off the path of negotiations in the first months of the war.
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