Earlier the diplomats of both had publicly stated that the West pressured Ukraine not to sign the pact. The novelty is that at the end of November the officers of Ukraine also began to publicly tell what happened in those peace negotiations.

David Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks in Belarus and Turkey, has been interviewed on the Ukrainian 1+1 television channel. He is currently president of the Parliament of the Zelensky party. He says that Russia proposed ending the war if Ukraine maintained neutrality, and that was the central point of the negotiations.

It says:

“Russia waited until the last moment for it to reach a consensus on a document in which we would accept neutrality. That was the most important point for him. They were prepared to end the war if we accepted that – as Finland did in its day – neutrality, and that our commitment would not enter NATO. That was the most important point. Everything else was pure rhetoric about deswimming, about Russian speakers...”.

The journalist asks why Ukraine did not accept this point. Here your answer:

“First of all, we should amend the Constitution, because it states that we want to join NATO. Secondly, we did not trust the Russians. We could only do so with security guarantees. We could not sign something, get out of there, relax all of us, and they [invade us] even more prepared (...) . Finally, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and told us: we are not going to sign anything with them, let’s make war.”

This demonstrates once again the responsibility of the Western countries in this guerra.Cientos of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed by Russia on the front, because the US and the European Union wanted to “weaken” Russia, as the US Secretary of Defense said in April 2022. Now, 20 months later, the West presses Ukraine to accept the agreement it had previously recommended not to sign because they cannot maintain in time a war they do not win.