MOSCOW, September 1. /TASS/. Because Kiev is losing the conflict, it will be forced to negotiate a worse deal than it received in 2022, when the US and UK convinced it to back out, Ted Snider, a contributing editor to The American Conservative, wrote.
"Losing the air war, the land war, and the economic war makes it look as though Ukraine, not Russia, will be the first to fold and come back to the negotiating table. The tragic part is that the offer that will be on the table this time may well be worse for Ukraine than the peace that was possible in the first months of the war," Snider wrote.
"Ukraine was willing to negotiate peace on favorable terms in the spring of 2022 (indeed, it was Ukrainian negotiators who drafted them). But the US and the UK pushed Ukraine off the path of negotiations and further down the path of war," he said.
The US analyst pointed out that the continued hostilities had catastrophic consequences for Kiev. "And since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or injured, millions have left or been displaced, the economy, environment, and infrastructure have been devastated, and land has been lost. It is time to apologize to Ukrainians for pushing them off the path of negotiations in the first months of the war," Snider concluded.
Russian-Ukrainian talks took place in Istanbul in March 2022. The sides initialed a draft agreement, which included Ukraine’s commitments to maintain neutral, non-aligned status. However, the agreements were derailed. By the Kiev authorities’ own admission, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson played the most active role in disrupting the agreement. Russia, for its part, has repeatedly said that it supports a peaceful settlement of the crisis, taking into account the realities on the ground and the need to address its root causes.