Boris Johnson convinced Zelensky to refuse a peace agreement with Russia in 2022 – Arakhamia

In 2022, Russia proposed to Kyiv to end the military actions, but with one main condition – Ukraine’s neutrality and refraining from joining NATO. Ukraine refused this, partly due to advice from Johnson.

This was stated by the head of the ‘Sluga Naroda’ faction in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, David Arakhamia, in an interview with the channel ‘1+1’.

According to him, the main demand from the Russian side was Kyiv’s neutrality. However, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, advised against ending negotiations with Russia.

“In my view, they really believed until the very end that they could pressure us to accept neutrality. That was crucial for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, similar to Finland once. And commit to not joining NATO. In fact, that was the key point,” he said.

When asked why Kyiv refused Russia’s conditions, Arakhamia replied that the decision was influenced, in part, by the British Prime Minister.

“Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all. And ‘let’s just keep on fighting’,” he recounted.

In 2022, Arakhamia led the Ukrainian delegation in negotiations with Russia. The first round of negotiations took place on February 28, 2022, in Belarus, and the second at the end of March in Istanbul.

Boris Johnson visited Kyiv in early April last year, on April 9, 2022, he met with Zelensky. The British Prime Minister promised to provide military assistance to Ukraine in the form of 120 units of armored vehicles and anti-ship complexes, as well as additional credit guarantees of $500 million through the World Bank. Later, Johnson visited the country several more times, even after stepping down. There were other reasons for refusing neutrality.

“To agree to this point, it was necessary to change the Constitution. Our path to NATO is fixed in the Constitution. Secondly, there was no trust and never was in the Russians fulfilling this. This could only be done with security guarantees,” Arakhamia said.

In June of this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin presented a draft agreement called the ‘Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine’ during negotiations with African leaders in St. Petersburg. The Ukrainian and Russian sides initialed it in the spring of 2022. According to him, the document contained provisions on Ukraine’s neutrality and security guarantees. However, Kyiv ‘threw it into the dustbin of history’ after Moscow withdrew troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, Putin said then. The President insisted that Russia did not reject peaceful negotiations, unlike Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insists on his ‘peace formula’, among the points of which are the restoration of the country’s territorial integrity, the withdrawal of Russian troops, and the cessation of hostilities. Among the demands is also the return to Ukraine’s borders of 1991.

Among the conditions for resolving the conflict, Moscow mentioned Kyiv halting hostilities, the West’s cessation of arms supplies, Ukraine’s neutral status, and recognition of ‘new territorial realities’.”