As of: March 7, 2024, 4:53 a.m
By: Nils Hinsberger
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New details about the peace offer between Russia and Ukraine have been published.
Kiev turned down the offer – for good reason?
Moscow - Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, there have been rumors that Ukraine did not accept Russia's peace offer because of pressure from Western states.
Parties like the AfD or the newly founded Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) base almost their entire argument against support on this assumption.
But how watertight is the accusation against Ukraine and “the West”?
Not very, as it turns out following the Wall Street Journal's
publication of details of the 2022 peace offer
.
About six weeks after the start of the war, Russian leader Vladimir Putin sent a draft peace offer to Ukraine, the US magazine reported.
In terms of content, it is primarily about the curtailment of the Ukrainian military in favor of Russia.
In doing so, Putin planned to make Ukraine permanently vulnerable to Russian military aggression.
Putin wanted to turn Ukraine into a “castrated state.”
Essentially, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators negotiated in the draft that Ukraine would be reduced to a "castrated state," according to the
Wall Street Journal
.
The central issue is the disarmament of the Ukrainian military.
The government in Kiev would have had to return all weapons it received from the West and would have been allowed to keep only 85,000 soldiers, 342 Soviet tanks and 519 Soviet artillery pieces.
According to
Bild,
the Ukrainian army had 250,000 soldiers before Russia's attack, which illustrates Russia's far-reaching demands.
In a draft peace agreement, Putin demanded massive concessions from Zelensky.
© Imago (montage)
The offer also stipulated that Ukraine would have to guarantee that it would not join NATO.
However, applying for EU membership was not a problem.
Without a functional army and a lack of support from the confederation, Ukraine would have been defenseless against a Russian attack.
Russia wanted to continue administering Ukraine's annexed Crimean Peninsula through peace agreements
Russia's influence in Ukraine would not have been broken even with the peace agreement.
The draft stipulated that the Crimean peninsula in eastern Ukraine, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, should remain under Russian administration.
The area should therefore not have been considered neutral.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
the Russian language should
be considered equal to the Ukrainian language in government and in courts.
The suppression of the Ukrainian language also currently plays a major role in the war.
According to the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, this serves to destroy Ukrainian culture.
What should happen to Crimea in the future is not specified in the contract.
This left it up to Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, to decide what to do next with the peninsula.
This would mean that “the fate of Donbas and other territorial matters would be left to the personal agreement of the two presidents,” one of the
Wall Street Journal
authors told
Bild
.
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Several countries have taken responsibility for maintaining Ukraine's neutrality and the negotiated ceasefire.
The peace agreement mentioned the USA, Great Britain, France, China and Russia.
This would have given Russia itself the responsibility of monitoring Ukraine's fulfillment of the contract.
Wagenknecht, AfD and Co used peace agreements for their Russia policy
Opponents of aid for Ukraine and the sanctions policy against Russia regularly call for peace talks to begin between Putin and Zelensky.
The BSW around the ex-leftist Sahra Wagenknecht had even set out the demand for diplomatic solutions to the Ukraine war in an initial policy program.
In talk shows, Wagenknecht had repeatedly cited the negotiations between the Kremlin and Ukraine over the peace treaty as an argument for Putin's willingness to make peace, the
Tagesschau
reported .
– without knowing about the content of the draft.
The fact that the peace treaty that has now become known does not represent a basis for a sustainable peace with Russia should
be clear at the latest after the publications by the
Wall Street Journal .
The agreement was drawn up at a time when Ukraine's back was against the wall in its conflict with Russia.
After Germany, among others, had assured Ukraine of its support, the country no longer had any reason to make such comprehensive concessions to Russia.
(nhi)