Russian President Vladimir Putin is now releasing the draft peace agreement that Moscow and Kiev negotiated in the spring of 2022. At the same time, he is accusing Ukraine of being the party that saw to it that the peace negotiations collapsed at the last moment.
The document shows that the parties’ delegations actually agreed on the general terms of Ukraine’s neutrality and on some security guarantees for the country during peace talks in March 2022, before Kiev suddenly broke off the talks and announced that the papers it had signed were invalid.
During a meeting with a group of African leaders in St. Petersburg showed Putin for the first time the draft document discussed by the Russian and Ukrainian envoys in Turkey over a year ago.
According to Putin, a document titled “Treaty of Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine” had been signed by the Ukrainian delegation.
The draft stipulates that Ukraine must incorporate “permanent neutrality” into its constitution. Russia, the United States, Great Britain, China and France are listed as guarantor states, but it is not clear whether any of these countries – in addition to Russia – have agreed to act as a security guarantor for Ukraine.
An annex to the draft, also shown by Putin, outlines both Russian and Ukrainian proposals regarding the size of Ukraine’s peacetime standing army, as well as its equipment. Moscow, which strongly wanted to limit Ukraine’s military capabilities, proposed that the number of soldiers should be limited to 85,000 and that the number of members of the National Guard should be limited to no more than 15,000.
Kiev, on the other hand, proposed that its armed forces would have up to 250,000 soldiers.
Moscow proposed that Ukraine be allowed to have 342 tanks, 1,029 armored vehicles, 96 rocket launchers, 50 fighter jets and 52 “support” aircraft. Kiev, on the other hand, wanted 800 tanks, 2,400 armored vehicles, 600 rocket launchers, 74 fighter jets and 86 “support aircraft”.
The two sides also exchanged proposals to limit Ukraine’s use of grenade launchers, anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft robotic systems, among others.
Negotiations broke down in the spring of 2022, shortly after Ukrainian officials accused Russian troops of killing civilians in several small towns around Kiev.
The accusations came immediately after Russian troops withdrew from areas outside the Ukrainian capital, which the Kremlin described at the time as a voluntary measure aimed at facilitating peace talks. At the same time, it was a fact that the invasion of the capital had not gone well at all.
Moscow has since repeatedly denied that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine.
Putin said on Saturday that it was Ukraine that sabotaged the negotiations.
“After we withdrew our troops from Kiev, as we had promised to do, the Kiev authorities … threw their commitments on the dustbin of history,” he said.
– They abandoned everything.
According to Putin, the action necessarily led to the continuation of the war.
– Where are there guarantees that they will not break agreements in the future? But even under these circumstances, we are always willing to resume negotiations, he said.
At the same time, Zelensky repeated Kiev’s position that negotiations are out of the question until Russia “has returned Crimea” and so on.
For his part, Putin argued that Russia’s annexation followed “international law and the UN Charter”, as Moscow had the right to intervene to protect the people of Donbass, who opposed the 2014 coup in Kiev.
Ukraine has now stopped discussing possible neutrality and has instead formally applied to join NATO.
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