Yelizaveta Surnacheva and Systema
(RFE/RL) — Early in peace talks that began days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow proposed a treaty whose one-sided conditions amounted to Kyiv’s surrender, according to a draft obtained by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit.
Acceptance of the proposal would have left Ukraine a neutral nation with a tiny, toothless army, no recourse to protection by NATO states, and no chance of regaining control over Crimea or the Donbas, where it would have had to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in their entirety, including the large portions still under Kyiv’s control at the time.
The proposed pact sheds light on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goals in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, none of which he has publicly renounced, and which he has repeatedly asserted will be achieved. It comes as the all-out war heads toward its fourth year with no clear sign of an end in sight but amid indications that peace talks could potentially be in the cards in 2025 or later.
The draft — titled Treaty On The Resolution Of The Situation In Ukraine And The Neutrality Of Ukraine — is dated March 7, 2022, 11 days after Russia launched the invasion and a week after talks between Ukraine and Russia began.Composed in Moscow and handed to the Ukrainian delegation that day, at the third round of talks, in a town in the Belavezha forest in Belarus, it is the first known document laying out Russia’s conditions for a peace deal after the start of the full-scale invasion.
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