[ For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to
look at the talks that took place during the first month after the
Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a
fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey.]
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PEACE TALKS ESSENTIAL AS WAR RAGES ON IN UKRAINE  
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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies
September 5, 2022
CODEPINK
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_ For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look
at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian
invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a
fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. _

Peace talks in Turkey, March 2022., Photo credit: Murat Cetin
Muhurdar / Turkish Presidential Press Service / AFP

 

Six months ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The United States, NATO and
the European Union (EU) wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag,
shelled out billions for arms shipments, and imposed draconian
sanctions intended to severely punish Russia for its aggression.

Since then, the people of Ukraine have been paying a price for this
war that few of their supporters in the West can possibly imagine.
Wars do not follow scripts, and Russia, Ukraine, the United States,
NATO and the European Union have all encountered unexpected
setbacks. 

Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic
damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the
West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across
the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six
months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious
energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the
interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of
ending this protracted conflict.

For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at
the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian
invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to
a fifteen-point peace plan
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talks mediated by Turkey. Details still had to be worked out, but the
framework and the political will were there.  

Russia was ready to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea
and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to
renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality
between Russia and NATO. 

The agreed framework provided for political transitions in Crimea and
Donbas that both sides would accept and recognize, based on
self-determination for the people of those regions. The future
security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed by a group of other
countries, but Ukraine would not host foreign military bases on its
territory.

On March 27, President Zelenskyy told a national TV audience
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“Our goal is obvious—peace and the restoration of normal life in
our native state as soon as possible.” He laid out his “red
lines” for the negotiations on TV to reassure his people he would
not concede too much, and he promised them a referendum on the
neutrality agreement before it would take effect.

Such early success for a peace initiative was no surprise
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conflict resolution specialists. The best chance for a negotiated
peace settlement is generally during the first months of a war. Each
month that a war rages on offers reduced chances for peace, as each
side highlights the atrocities of the other, hostility becomes
entrenched and positions harden.

The abandonment of that early peace initiative stands as one of the
great tragedies of this conflict, and the full scale of that tragedy
will only become clear over time as the war rages on and its dreadful
consequences accumulate.

Ukrainian and Turkish sources have revealed that the U.K. and U.S.
governments played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects
for peace. During U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “surprise
visit” to Kyiv on April 9th, he reportedly told
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Minister Zelenskyy that the U.K. was “in it for the long run,”
that it would not be party to any agreement between Russia and
Ukraine, and that the “collective West” saw a chance to
“press” Russia and was determined to make the most of it. 

The same message was reiterated by U.S. Defense Secretary Austin, who
followed Johnson to Kyiv on April 25th and made it clear that the U.S.
and NATO were no longer just trying to help Ukraine defend itself but
were now committed to using the war to “weaken” Russia. Turkish
diplomats
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retired British diplomat Craig Murray that these messages from the
U.S. and U.K. killed their otherwise promising efforts to mediate a
ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution.

In response to the invasion, much of the public in Western countries
accepted the moral imperative of supporting Ukraine as a victim of
Russian aggression. But the decision by the U.S. and British
governments to kill peace talks and prolong the war, with all the
horror, pain and misery that entails for the people of Ukraine, has
neither been explained to the public, nor endorsed by a consensus of
NATO countries. Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective
West,” but in May, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy all made
public statements that contradicted his claim.

Addressing the European Parliament on May 9, French President Emmanuel
Macron declared,
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are not at war with Russia,” and that Europe’s duty was “to
stand with Ukraine to achieve the cease-fire, then build peace.”

Meeting with President Biden at the White House on May 10, Italian
Prime Minister Mario Draghi told reporters
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“People… want to think about the possibility of bringing a
cease-fire and starting again some credible negotiations. That’s the
situation right now. I think that we have to think deeply about how to
address this.”

After speaking by phone with President Putin on May 13, German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted that he told Putin
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“There must be a cease-fire in Ukraine as quickly as possible.”

But American and British officials continued to pour cold water on
talk of renewed peace negotiations. The policy shift in April appears
to have involved a commitment by Zelenskyy that Ukraine, like the U.K.
and U.S., was “in it for the long run” and would fight on,
possibly for many years, in exchange for the promise of tens of
billions of dollars worth of weapons shipments, military training,
satellite intelligence and Western covert operations.

As the implications of this fateful agreement became clearer, dissent
began to emerge, even within the U.S. business and media
establishment. On May 19, the very day that Congress appropriated $40
billion for Ukraine, including $19 billion for new weapons shipments,
with not a single dissenting Democratic vote, The New York
Times editorial board penned a lead editorial
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“The war in Ukraine is getting complicated, and America isn’t
ready.” 

The Times asked serious unanswered questions about U.S. goals in
Ukraine, and tried to reel back unrealistic expectations built up by
three months of one-sided Western propaganda, not least from its own
pages. The board acknowledged, “A decisive military victory for
Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia
has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.… Unrealistic
expectations could draw [the United States and NATO] ever deeper into
a costly, drawn-out war.”

 More recently, warhawk Henry Kissinger, of all people, publicly
questioned the entire U.S. policy of reviving its Cold War with Russia
and China and the absence of a clear purpose or endgame short of World
War III. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues
which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to
end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” Kissinger told
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 U.S. leaders have inflated the danger that Russia poses to its
neighbors and the West, deliberately treating it as an enemy with whom
diplomacy or cooperation would be futile, rather than as a neighbor
raising understandable defensive concerns over NATO expansion and its
gradual encirclement by U.S. and allied military forces. 

 Far from aiming to deter Russia from dangerous or destabilizing
actions, successive administrations of both parties have sought every
means available to “overextend and unbalance”
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the while misleading the American public into supporting an
ever-escalating and unthinkably dangerous conflict between our two
countries, which together possess more than 90% of the world’s
nuclear weapons.

 After six months of a U.S. and NATO proxy war with Russia in
Ukraine, we are at a crossroads. Further escalation should be
unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery
barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare that slowly and
agonizingly destroys Ukraine, killing hundreds of Ukrainians with each
day that passes. 

 The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return
to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end, find reasonable
political solutions to Ukraine’s political divisions, and seek a
peaceful framework for the underlying geopolitical competition between
the United States, Russia and China. 

Campaigns to demonize, threaten and pressure our enemies can only
serve to cement hostility and set the stage for war. People of good
will can bridge even the most entrenched divisions and overcome
existential dangers, as long as they are willing to talk - and listen
- to their adversaries._        _

_Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace
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including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic
Republic of Iran
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_Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with
CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion
and Destruction of Iraq
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* Ukraine invasion
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* negotiations
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* peace settlement
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