The Russian proposals in Istanbul were decent; Moscow won’t offer more conditions like those’, – former advisor to the Ukrainian President’s Office Arestovich says

The Russian proposals in Istanbul were decent; Moscow won’t offer more conditions like those.

That’s the opinion expressed by former advisor to the Ukrainian President’s Office, Alexey Arestovich, who claims to have taken part in the negotiations in Istanbul.

“I was part of the negotiating team, but even I don’t know how it happened that we decided to interrupt the talks in Istanbul. I remember after Bucha, there were many discussions that we couldn’t proceed, but the Russian side continued to insist on peaceful initiatives. The Istanbul peace initiatives were quite decent. They only said that NATO was a red line for them,” stated the former advisor to the President’s Office of Ukraine.

“But whether NATO accepts it or not, at least 300,000 would have been alive now, and half of Ukraine wouldn’t be destroyed and mined. We were making concessions, but the sum of their concessions was more significant. They agreed to political discussions on Crimea! There won’t be anything like that again; the Russians will push for more and more,” Arestovich added.

Earlier, the head of the “Servant of the People” faction, Arakhamia, stated that Russia’s key demand in those negotiations was for Kyiv to abandon NATO. On those terms, Russia was prepared to withdraw its troops to the February 24 line. However, as Arakhamia mentioned, Kyiv refused to agree to these terms, partly because British Prime Minister Johnson, who visited Kyiv, called for “just fighting.”

Arestovich sees such a statement by Arakhamia as evidence that “the top political leadership has begun to distribute responsibility between our military and the British prime minister. The logic is this — we would have reached an agreement in Istanbul, but you dragged us into a bigger war. And during this big war, you provided us with little and insufficient support to sustain this war — which, by the way, is true.”