When Chickens Fly To Kiev

New Report: The West Was Too Cowardly To Secure Ukraine, So Sabotaged Talks Then Flooded It With Arms

Shocking new information in the journal of Foreign Affairs sheds light on Ukrainian-Russian peace prospects - and how the West smashed these to bits. The authors are from extremely establishment-friendly organisations, RAND and John Hopkins, but their findings should be seen as pure adrenaline for the peace movement.

Just after Russia invaded in February 2022, a document written in Belarus and Turkey called the “Istanbul Communique” went through 18 drafts before talks abruptly broke off in May.

The Ukrainian chief negotiator said Russia was “ready to finish the war if we, like Finland, adopted neutrality and undertook not to join NATO”. Ukraine was willing “to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during WWII as freedom fighters”, which would have allowed the Kremlin to claim it had achieved “denazification”. For its part, astonishingly, Russia said it was willing “to facilitate Ukraine’s full accession to the EU” and even to “seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next ten to fifteen years”.

So, why didn’t it happen? Why did the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson fly to Kiev and wreck the talks? Negotiating with Putin was like dealing with “a crocodile when it’s got your leg in its jaws,” Johnson said, I suspect reworking a fictional line by Winston Churchill from the 2017 movie Darkest Hour. “We won’t sign anything at all,” he said. “Let’s just keep fighting.” Western attitudes dampened Zelensky’s appetite to pursue the peace platform on which he was elected.

(Incidentally, Boris Johnson said that Putin has “demonstrably failed to divide Europe” - an objective with which even I must admit Johnson fucking excelled.)

At least the West was being all brave though, right? Not really, no. More like just reckless with the lives of others. The authors say that the West knew such a peace agreement would have created “new legal commitments for the United States including an obligation to go to war with Russia if it invaded Ukraine again”. The authors state “that stipulation alone would have made the treaty a non-starter for Washington”. The “risk-averse” Western powers “didn’t want to guarantee Ukrainian security”.

At the time, Israeli PM Naftali Bennett incredulously asked Zelensky: “America will give you guarantees? It will commit that in several years if Russia violates something it will send soldiers? After leaving Afghanistan and all that? I said, ‘Volodymyr, it won’t happen’”.

In other words, the US/UK never wanted peace in Ukraine in part because it would have obliged them to come to Ukraine’s defence in the event of a future Russian invasion. Far better instead to avoid all responsibilities and throw hand-grenades into the negotiating room.

To clarify, I wouldn’t much like committing to a future war over Ukraine, either. But given the compromises proposed above, it’s inconceivable that we would ever have had to fight one. A just and reasonable settlement was the way to prevent war permanently.

The likes of Boris Johnson, Anthony Blinken, Justin Trudeau, and Joe Biden all went to Ukraine thinking of peace as unthinkable and of war being the default option - on the assumption that it comes with zero responsibility to Ukrainians or anyone else.

Has anyone ever seen such a flock of chickens go to Kiev?

Now, these sick fucks are escalating further, egging the Ukrainians on to bomb Russia’s nuclear early warning systems - literally, the eyes of the Russian bear. Boris Johnson last week praised - in person and on camera, and with explicit language - Ukraine’s Azov battalion, who are actual unreconstructed Nazis. Such men should be treated with the utter derision they deserve and with immediate effect. Peace NOW.

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PS. I discussed the Russia-Ukraine peace deal on Mel K’s show. Here’s a short extract, which includes a debate in the comments. Russia had actually agreed to withdraw to its pre-2022 lines, which I neglected to include in the original article above.

Read further detailed, authoritative analysis of this issue with my colleague Kit Klarenberg.