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West at fault for 2022 Ukraine negotiations failing, Slovak PM says

According to Robert Fico, Ukraine is headed for a potentially catastrophic future

PRAGUE, January 26. /TASS/. Western countries have sabotaged the signing of the agreement and prevented the conflict in Ukraine from ending as early as 2022, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said on the STVR TV channel.

"The war could have ended as far back as April 2022, when a peace settlement was on the agenda," he said. "However, the West prevented Ukraine from signing the agreement."

According to the Slovak PM, Ukraine is headed for a potentially catastrophic future. "[Ukraine] will never be in NATO and will have immense problems with joining the EU," he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Moscow is ready for talks with Kiev. He has emphasized that not only is Russia ready for them, but it also conducted such negotiations at the very beginning of the conflict and even drafted a mutually acceptable agreement initialed with the Ukrainian side. However, Ukraine rejected this agreement on external advice.

Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, with the talks lasting for at least three hours. The principles of their preliminary agreement included Ukraine’s commitment to a neutral and unaligned status, and its promise not to deploy foreign-made weapons, including nuclear ones, on its territory.

Russia withdrew its forces from the Kiev and Chernigov regions. Following this, however, the settlement talks were frozen. According to President Putin, Kiev rejected the agreements. The Ukrainian side has claimed that this decision was made on the advice of Boris Johnson, who was Britain’s prime minister at the time.