Sierra Voices Editor’s Note: I subscribe to Aaron Maté‘s substack and read everything I can find by him precisely because he sticks so closely to the facts in his reporting. That’s certainly true in the following article, in which he describes Putin’s repeated attempts to make peace with Ukraine, both immediately before and immediately after the Russian invasion, attempts that were in all cases thwarted by the U.S, and its allies. [Don]

by Aaron Maté

EXCERPTS:

This past July, just as Ukrainian forces were taking “staggering” losses in a counteroffensive that the US pushed them into, Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that diplomacy with Russia was not an option.

“If we saw any evidence that Russia was interested in having meaningful peace talks, we would be the first to jump on it,” Blinken told the Aspen Security Forum. “Unfortunately, I see zero evidence that Russia’s interested.” 

[…]

In December 2021, Moscow submitted detailed draft treaties that the US and NATO soon rejected. After Russian forces attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, the two sides immediately held talks, which culminated in an April 2022 agreement brokered in Istanbul. But according to multiple sources, the US and UK sabotaged it.

Now more evidence has emerged that the Biden administration undermined the Turkey peace deal in April 2022, as well as additional diplomatic opportunities in the period since.

A veteran Ukrainian diplomat who was part of Kyiv’s delegation in Istanbul, Amb. Oleksandr Chalyi, has become the latest insider to confirm that an agreement was reached there. At a public event in Geneva, Chalyi recalled that “we were very close” to ending “our war with some peaceful settlement.” Putin, he stressed, “tried to do everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement.” And in Istanbul, the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise.”

Yet “for some reasons,” Chalyi added, that compromise “was postponed.” Although he did not elaborate, those reasons are not obscure. As Ukrainian government sources initially revealed and multiple people have confirmed, the US and UK opposed the deal and refused to give Ukraine the security guarantees that it required. According to Davyd Arakhamia, the head of Ukraine’s delegation in Turkey, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson informed Kyiv that “we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” Johnson’s missive was a joint US-UK order for Ukraine to abandon the peace deal and “fight” Russia on their behalf. For bowing to this demand, Kyiv received a massive new infusion of NATO weaponry – and untold numbers of lost lives.

Despite the significance of the sabotaged Istanbul peace deal, and the high-level corroboration for it, no establishment US media outlet has reported it. The motive is not hard to discern: to justify continuing the Ukraine proxy war, the Biden administration and its media allies must sustain a narrative that portrays Russia as a recalcitrant, belligerent actor that rejects any reasonable accommodation. Accordingly, the most concrete, meaningful diplomatic opportunity to date must be concealed from the public footing the bill.

[…]

Read full article here:
https://www.aaronmate.net/p/putin-did-everything-possible-to