U.S. HAS OPPOSED ALL PEACE INITIATIVES FOR UKRAINE [1]
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, approximately 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 8,000 Ukrainian civilians have died and 30,000 Russian soldiers have died. Fourteen million Ukrainians have been displaced. This didn't have to happen.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine in 2019 on the promise he would make peace with Russia. But the U.S. and other NATO countries have not supported him in that, and in fact they only urged Ukraine to stand up to Russia using Western arms. As shown in the enumerated statements below, the U.S. and NATO blocked every move toward peace between Russia and Ukraine:
(1) The Minsk agreement II, if implemented, could have earlier averted the entire war. On February 12, 2015, the Minsk II agreement was signed between Ukraine and Russia as brokered by France and Germany. It would have stopped the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine between Russian Separatists and the Ukrainian military and would have granted a degree of autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the Donbas that had voted for independence from Ukraine after the 2014 coup in Ukraine. The basic problem with Minsk II was that the Ukrainians refused either to let the Donbas republics become independent or to pass the laws on autonomy that were necessary in order to implement the Minsk agreement.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy defeated Petro Poroshenko in the 2019 election on a platform that included making peace with Russia by signing the Minsk II Agreement. Unfortunately, he came under intense pressure, to which he succumbed, not to implement Minsk II, pressure [2] from the far right ultra-nationalists that have significant power disproportionate to their moderately small number. Zelenskyy abandoned his campaign peace promise and refused to talk to the leaders of the Donbas and implement the Minsk Agreement.
The United States and the UN both endorsed the Minsk agreement in 2015 on paper. But the U.S. and other NATO countries did nothing at all to push the Ukrainians into implementing it. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have admitted that Western leaders only agreed to the Minsk II accord to buy time, so that they could build up Ukraine's armed forces to eventually recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force.
(2) In December 2021, before the invasion, Russia submitted to the U.S. and NATO two draft mutual security treaties, one between Russia and the United States and one between Russia and NATO. The eight articles in the proposed Russia-U.S. treaty and the nine articles in the proposed NATO-Russia treaty addressed and rectified specific ways in which the Russian leaders believed Russia's security was threatened by current U.S. and NATO policy. The issues Russia raised in these two draft treaties included:
a. NATO expansion
b. Positioning nuclear-capable weapons close to Russia's borders
c. Arming Ukraine (for example the Biden administration gave Ukraine $275 million in military aid in 2021)
d. U.S. withdrawal from the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Force) treaty (The Trump administration suspended the U.S. compliance with the INF Treaty on 2 February 2019.)
e. Lack of a phone hotline between Russia and NATO to defuse tensions in a nuclear emergency.
Unfortunately, the United States and NATO summarily dismissed Russia's proposals. If the U.S. had been willing to negotiate with Russia on these proposals, there is a strong likelihood that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
(3) Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview [3] posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday February 4, 2023, that the U.S. and its Western allies had blocked his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.
On March 5, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.
Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort. For the Russian side, he said they dropped "denazification" as a requirement for a ceasefire. Bennett defined "denazification" as the removal of Zelenskyy. During his meeting in Moscow with Putin, Bennett said the Russian leader guaranteed that he wouldn't try to kill Zelenskyy.
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