“Putin is preparing a long war against the West”
The German daily Die Welt has just revealed the existence of a 17-page peace agreement that could have ended the war in Ukraine just weeks after Russia began its invasion.
Negotiators from both sides had worked hard on the agreement between February and April 2022, and the original version of this special document has now been made available to the German media.
“In March 2022, only a few conditions were missing for the resolution of the conflict, which was to be ‘negotiated by Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky at a summit meeting – which never took place’", underlines La Dépêche.
While Alexander Fomin, Russian Deputy Minister of Defense, announced on March 29, 2022, the withdrawal of the Russian army from the Kiev region; hope was beginning to emerge. The first negotiations in Istanbul were taking shape and the drafting of a peace agreement was launched. Die Welt reports the conditions issued by Moscow to Kiev: the renunciation of all military alliances, including its membership in NATO, the adoption of permanent neutrality, “partial demilitarization, the reduction of Kiev’s ground army to 85,000 soldiers instead of one million, the maintenance of Russian troops in Crimea annexed since 2014…" What could Ukraine expect in return? Its right to self-defense. “In the event of an armed attack against Ukraine, the guarantor states would have undertaken to help Kiev exercise its right to self-defense, as guaranteed by the United Nations Charter, within a maximum period of three days,” Le Figaro specified.
More than two years after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, the failure of the agreement is having a heavy impact.
According to the Ukrainian Security Council, Putin, by appointing economist Andrei Belousov to the Defense Ministry, wants to stretch the war over time. This choice “means that the Kremlin master “is planning a war for a long period to come. A war not only against Ukraine but also against the West as a whole, a war against NATO.”
(MH with Manon Pierre - Source: La Dépêche - Picture: by Kremlin.ru via Wikicommons under license Creative commons CC-BY-4.0)
