The video in the tweet above has English subtitles. It is part of a Ukrainian TV interview with the the leader of the Servant of the People parliament faction David Arakhamia by the journalist Natalia Moseychuk.
In March and April 2022 Arkhamia had led the Ukrainian delegation at peace talks with the Russians in Belarus and Turkey.
There is video on Youtube with an
announcement of the interview,
but not of the interview itself.
Arnault Bertrand
relays here what was said:
"- He confirms that
Russia’s principal goal for the war wasn’t to invade the whole of Ukraine but to force Ukraine to become a neutral country that would not be part of NATO: “[Russia] really hoped almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an agreement so that we would take neutrality. It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to, – as Finland once did, – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO. In fact, this was the key point. Everything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning’ about denazification, the Russian-speaking population and blah-blah-blah."
- When asked why Ukraine did not agree to this, here’s what he says: “First, in order to agree to this point, it is necessary to change the Constitution. Our path to NATO is written in the Constitution. Secondly, there was no confidence in the Russians that they would do it. This could only be done if there were security guarantees. We could not sign something, step away, everyone would relax there, and then they would [invade] even more prepared – because they had, in fact, gone in unprepared for such a resistance. Therefore, we could only explore this route when there is absolute certainty that this will not happen again. There is no such certainty. Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight.”
(...)
He said that the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that "we will not sign anything with them at all, let's just fight."
The question arises-what exactly did Johnson mean by "we will not sign anything with them"? The answer here may be one –
Western countries refused to give joint guarantees of Ukraine's security with Russia, which were supposed to be attached to the peace treaty and the neutral status agreement.
Arakhamia also said this directly in an interview: "The Western allies advised us not to agree to ephemeral security guarantees, which at that time could not be given at all."
Recall that security guarantees under the then plan were supposed to be given by Russia, leading Western countries and a number of other major world powers. But if the NATO countries refused to give guarantees and only the Russian Federation and, possibly, China and Turkey would give them, then this would actually mean a complete break in Ukraine's relations with the Western world. What Zelensky, of course, could not do.
In other words, it was the position of the Western allies "let's just fight" that had a decisive influence on the decision of the Ukrainian authorities to abandon the agreements with the Russian Federation in the spring of 2022.
(...)
As for the position of Kiev, Arakhamia once again stated it in the same interview, saying that the negotiations are not profitable at the moment, since "our negotiating position is very bad." But who does time work for?
If in 2022 it was possible to end the war by liberating almost the entire territory of the country without a fight in exchange for a neutral status, now there are no such options. And the alternative is quite different – a long war with all its victims and risks, or peace/truce along the front line with the actual consolidation of Russian control over the occupied territories (and, it is possible, this will also include additional requirements in the form of the same neutral status, for example). The main question is what will be the conditions and negotiating positions in the future and whether the Ukrainian authorities have a clear understanding that they will not be even worse than they are now.
