by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama
We already know that Ukraine, in early April 2022, rejected to make peace with Russia. We know this from talks by the former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennet, from the former Turkish foreign minister, from former chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder as well as from reporting from Ukraine.
But only now do we hear the same story from a Ukrainian official:
Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo – 21:45 UTC · Nov 24, 2023‼️ BOMBSHELL: Ukraine admits that Russia only wanted neutrality from them!
Russia wanted Ukraine to be neutral like Finnland was! But Ukraine was not sure if they can trust it and then Boris Johnson came and said:
-> “We will not sign anything, let’s do war!”I knew it!
video
The video in the tweet above has English subtitles. It is part of a Ukrainian TV interview with the the leader of the Servant of the People parliament faction David Arakhamia by the journalist Natalia Moseychuk. In March and April 2022 Arkhamia had led the Ukrainian delegation at peace talks with the Russians in Belarus and Turkey.
There is video on Youtube with an announcement of the interview, but not of the interview itself.
Arnault Bertrand relays here what was said:
– He confirms that Russia’s principal goal for the war wasn’t to invade the whole of Ukraine but to force Ukraine to become a neutral country that would not be part of NATO: “[Russia] really hoped almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an agreement so that we would take neutrality. It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to, – as Finland once did, – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO. In fact, this was the key point. Everything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning’ about denazification, the Russian-speaking population and blah-blah-blah.”- When asked why Ukraine did not agree to this, here’s what he says: “First, in order to agree to this point, it is necessary to change the Constitution. Our path to NATO is written in the Constitution. Secondly, there was no confidence in the Russians that they would do it. This could only be done if there were security guarantees. We could not sign something, step away, everyone would relax there, and then they would [invade] even more prepared – because they had, in fact, gone in unprepared for such a resistance. Therefore, we could only explore this route when there is absolute certainty that this will not happen again. There is no such certainty. Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.”
Strana also reports, in Russian, of the interview and comments (machine translation):…
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