According to the German newspaper Die Welt, this follows from the draft of this contract, which was agreed upon by representatives of both parties in Istanbul in mid-April, with the provision that Presidents Volodymyr Zelenskyi and Vladimir Putin will personally resolve the disputed points. But they did not meet.
The Russian and Ukrainian sides began to negotiate a cessation of hostilities immediately after the start of the war. In the 17-page document, Ukraine was supposed to commit to “permanent neutrality”, which would see Kiev give up its ambitions for membership in military groups including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Ukraine also pledged never to receive, produce or buy nuclear weapons, allow foreign troops to enter its territory, and never give any other country access to its military infrastructure, including airports and ports.
In addition, Kyiv was to refrain from conducting military exercises with foreign participation and participating in any military conflicts. According to Article 3 of the document, nothing directly prevented Kyiv from becoming a member of the European Union (EU) in the future.
The Ukrainian territories occupied before the start of the aggression, i.e. the Crimean peninsula and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, were to remain with Russia.
In response, Russia promised not to attack Ukraine again. To reassure Kyiv, Moscow agreed that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, i.e. the US, Great Britain, France, China and Russia, would provide comprehensive security guarantees to Ukraine.
Scholz called for more support for Ukraine. Germany will add the Patriot system, the taurus will not
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Russia was thus supposed to become one of the guarantors, paradoxically despite the fact that it was the aggressor. In the event of an armed attack on Ukraine, the guarantor countries were to undertake to support Kyiv in its right to self-defense, as enshrined in the UN Charter. However, security guarantees for Ukraine also resulted from previous international conventions recognized by Russia as well.
The question of the size of the Ukrainian army remained unresolved. Moscow demanded that it be reduced to 85,000 troops, while Kiev demanded 250,000. Opinions also differed on the amount of military equipment. Russia demanded a reduction in the number of tanks to 342, and Kiev wanted to keep it at 800.
Russia has also demanded that Russian be made the second official language in Ukraine, that mutual sanctions be lifted and disputes in international courts be stopped. But Kyiv did not agree to that.
Die Welt, whose article was also published by the online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda and the Russian news agency TASS, quoted an unnamed member of the Ukrainian delegation as saying that it “was the best agreement we could have.”
“Looking back, we can say that Ukraine was in a stronger negotiating position then than it is today. If the war had ended two months after it began, it would have saved many lives,” the letter further quoted the unnamed official as saying.
The German daily also writes that a member of the Ukrainian delegation, Davyd Arachamiya, later indicated why Zelenskyi and Putin did not meet in the end. On April 9, 2022, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived in Kyiv and reportedly said that London would “not sign anything” with Putin and that Ukraine should continue to fight. But Johnson rejected this claim.
According to some sources, the mass murder of civilians committed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha also contributed to the collapse of the negotiations. The first pictures and videos of the massacre appeared in public at the beginning of April 2022.
At night, the Russians fired rockets at Ukrainian power plants and at Kharkiv
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