Yesterday at 18:23
Russian propaganda keeps promoting a false narrative that Ukraine and Russia supposedly approached a peace agreement in the spring of 2022, but Ukraine disrupted the negotiation process.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba stated this in a video he posted on X.
“They want people to forget that it was Russia that started the full-scale war in February 2022 and instead focus on the talks at the end of March 2022. By shifting the focus, they are trying to tell everyone: ‘See, Russia actually wanted peace. It was Ukraine that rejected it.’ Absurd. If Russia wanted peace, it should never have attacked Ukraine in the first place,” Kuleba explains.
He adds that this narrative is one of the favorite lies promoted by Russia and its sympathisers.
The Ukrainian diplomat also refuted another Russian narrative that accompanies the previous one. It says that the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and pressured President Zelenskyy into giving up on the peace deal.
Kuleba lists two reasons why that couldn’t have been true. Firtsly, nobody can pressure Volodymyr Zelenskyy into anything, and secondly, the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia had been ongoing throughout April and even in May, long after Boris Johnson visited Ukraine. In addition, the delegations were far from finding common ground as they met in Istanbul.
Kuleba comes to a conclusion that Vladimir Putin can be the one to blame for losing the opportunity to restore peace.
“He has been ruining peace in Ukraine for more than a decade. […] This is why the war drags on. Only together can we stop Russia and put an end to its aggressive plans for the rest of Europe,” the head of the Foreign Ministry emphasized.
Read also: There won’t be any ‘Minsk-3’ – German ambassador on future peace talks
