Ex leader of Germany confirms revelations by ex Israeli PM & Ukrainian media: "At the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022 with Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans. I had two talks with Umerov, then a one-on-one meeting with Putin, and then with Putin’s envoy. Umerov opened the conversation with greetings from Zelensky. As a compromise for Ukraine’s security guarantees, the Austrian model or the 5+1 model was proposed. Umerow thought that was a good thing. He also showed willingness on the other points. He also said that Ukraine does not want NATO membership. He also said that Ukraine wants to reintroduce Russian in the Donbass. But in the end, nothing happened. My impression was that nothing could happen, because everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal. Because the result will now be that Russia will be tied more closely to China, which the West should not want.
And the Europeans?
They have failed. There would have been a window in March 2022. The Ukrainians were ready to talk about Crimea. This was even confirmed by the Bild newspaper at the time.
(Gerhard Schroeder shows a page from the BILD newspaper with the title “Finally peace in sight?”. It says: "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (44) himself had already hinted at concessions for negotiations: He no longer insists on his country’s accession to NATO, he told the US broadcaster ABC. And he is also ready for a ‘compromise’ on Crimea and the breakaway provinces in the Donbass. ‘In every negotiation, my goal is to end the war with Russia,’ Zelensky told BILD.
In 2022, I received a request from Ukraine asking if I could mediate between Russia and Ukraine. The question was whether I could convey a message to Putin. There would also be someone who would have a very close relationship with the Ukrainian president himself. This was Rustem Umerov, the current Minister of Defense of Ukraine. He is a member of the Crimean Tatar minority. Then the question was: How to end the war?
I have some doubts here.
Ameribro here. According to Wikipedia, BILD is a German right-wing tabloid. So, this is a little like somebody citing Breitbart, maybe? And then there’s other points here that seem like they may have been deliberately taken out of context.
The Ukrainians don’t want war with Russia. Only insane people or people who don’t know war want war. Zelensky (and many Ukrainians) didn’t believe Russia was actually going to do it, and the Biden administration was desperately trying to convince him that all of our intel said it was happening right up until it actually happened.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/21/why-ukrainians-dont-believe-in-war-with-russia-distrust-west
But Russia didn’t just um… What do they say? De-nazify? Donetsk and Luhansk. They tried to push all the way to Kiev, they tried to take the whole damn country. It’s not like Ukraine invaded Russia, it’s the other way around. Is it possible that the Ukrainian state is being coerced? Could be, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. All of the Ukrainians I’ve met from well before this conflict started seemed pretty adamant about having a distinct cultural and national identity from Russia. I find it hard to imagine that they’d be happy about joining the new Russian imperial project any more than Iraq was (our Mexico would be) about joining the US imperial project.
Anybody who keeps parroting that Russia was going to take Kiev with 100k troops exposes themselves as an incredibly gullible individual.
So they drove the 40 km armor column to just outside of Kiev on a, what, sight seeing tour? I expect the plan was to try and make the Zelensky govt shit their breeches and run so that they could install a friendly government and put a bow on the operation.
But the column! Guess I have to blow the dust off these again.
Here’s the Marine Corps Gazette explaining what happened.
The Kiev regime is controlled by genocidal Nazis trying to ethnically cleanse the population of Donetsk and Luhansk. Those places were already ‘denazified’, the problem was the Nazis on the Kiev side of the trenches continuously shelling the civilian population for eight years (with western support).
But thankfully the denazification spread!
It was either to draw forces away from the true frontline or to force Zelensky to step down. It ended up achieving the former and not the latter.
Russia has no chance of actually holding Northwestern Ukraine. They have decent odds in Southern and Eastern Ukraine because of demographics, but they’d be fighting Ukrainian nationalist insurgencies (a la Gaza v. Israel) if they tried to occupy Kiev.
The USSR had the same issue - Ukrainian nationalist sabotage coupled with negligence and malicious intent on behalf of the communist party individuals responsible for Ukraine (who were later executed by Stalin during the purges due to this failure) led to a famine that killed millions. Ukrainians want to be independent, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of Ukraine is dominated by ethnic Ukrainians. It’s not.
It’s called a pinning operation as plenty of actual military people have explained many times. The armor column forced Ukraine to keep troops around Kiev while Russian army took over Donbas and Kherson which Ukraine never managed to take back.
Meanwhile, Zelensky government did shit their breeches, and Ukraine almost ended up signing a peace agreement last March, but then Bojo stopped that and here we are now. Hundreds of thousands of people dead, and the outcome is going to be exactly the same. This is western diplomacy at its finest.