As of: March 7, 2024, 5:24 a.m
By: Nils Hinsberger
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Russia's peace offer to Ukraine was more than it seems.
New details show how Putin wanted to permanently weaken Ukraine.
Moscow - Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, it has been repeatedly suspected that the country rejected a peace offer from Russia due to pressure from the West.
This assumption forms the basis for the arguments of parties such as the AfD or the newly founded Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) against supporting Ukraine.
But how tenable is this accusation against Ukraine and “the West”?
Not very, as the Wall Street Journal's
publication of details of the 2022 peace deal
shows.
About a month and a half after the start of the war, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is said to have sent a peace proposal to Ukraine, according to the US magazine.
The proposal mainly involves a reduction in the Ukrainian military in favor of Russia.
Putin intended to keep Ukraine permanently vulnerable to Russian military aggression.
Putin's plan for Ukraine - a "castrated" state through the peace offer
Negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in the draft were aimed at reducing Ukraine to a "castrated state," according to the
Wall Street Journal
.
The focus is on the disarmament of the Ukrainian military.
The government in Kiev would have been allowed to return all weapons received from the West and keep only 85,000 soldiers, 342 Soviet tanks and 519 Soviet artillery pieces.
Before Russia's attack, the Ukrainian army had
more than 250,000 soldiers, according to
Bild , which underlines Russia's far-reaching demands.
Putin's peace offer to Ukraine would have deprived the country of any defense.
© Sergei Savostyanov/afp
In addition, the offer stipulates that Ukraine must guarantee not to join NATO.
However, applying for EU membership did not pose a problem.
Without a functioning army and without support from the confederation, Ukraine would have been defenseless against a Russian attack.
Russia wanted to continue administering Crimea after a peace offer in the Ukraine war
Even with the peace agreement, Russia's influence in Ukraine would not have been broken.
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 be considered neutral.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
the Russian language should
have equal rights with the Ukrainian language in government and in the courts.
The suppression of the Ukrainian language still plays a major role in the war today.
According to the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, this serves to destroy Ukrainian culture.
What should happen to Crimea in the future was not specified in the contract.
This would have left it up to Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, to decide what to do with the peninsula.
This would leave “the fate of Donbas and other territorial matters to the personal agreement of the two presidents,” one of the Wall Street Journal authors told
Bild
.
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According to the peace offer, several countries committed to maintaining Ukraine's neutrality and the negotiated ceasefire.
The peace agreement mentions the USA, Great Britain, France, China and Russia.
Russia would thus have given itself the task of monitoring Ukraine's fulfillment of the contract.
Peace agreement exploited by Wagenknecht and AfD for Russia policy
Opponents of support for Ukraine and the sanctions policy against Russia regularly call for talks between Putin and Zelensky.
The BSW around the former 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 lasting 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 was on the defensive in the conflict with Russia.
After Germany, among others, had assured Ukraine of its support, the country no longer had any reason to make such far-reaching concessions to Russia.
(nhi)
Editor Nils Hinsberger wrote this article and then used it in an AI language model for optimization at his own discretion. All information has been carefully checked. Find out more about our AI principles here.