Former Zelenskyy Advisor Confirms Boris Johnson Blocked Ukraine Peace Deal In April of 2022.

Oleksii Arestovych, A Former Advisor To Ukraine Confirmed That UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Joe Biden Prevented Peace In Ukraine.

It has been well documented that in early April of 2022, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine, but then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine and convinced Zelensky to abandon the deal, in order to use the war-and the lives of Ukrainians- to weaken Russia.

The most recent confirmation of this comes from an interview Oleksiy Arestovych, the former adviser to the head of the Ukrainian president’s office- who took part in the negotiations- did with Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak.

In the interview, when asked why he began to be critical of the Zelenskyy government, Arestovych replied, “The fact that they did not continue negotiations in Istanbul, didn’t finish their work after Johnson arrived,” adding, “This was already a crime, against Ukraine, the Ukrainian people”.

He added, “I was at the negotiations, we returned from the Istanbul negotiations, and then something happened to Zelensky”.

While mainstream media has ignored the well-documented fact that Johnson blocked the peace deal, claiming that the negotiations fell through after Russian troops massacred civilians in Bucha, Arestovych noted, “Formal negotiations lasted until May 17th, there are rumours everything stopped after Bucha, that’s not true. Negotiations were ongoing. The April 9 meeting between Zelensky and Putin in Istanbul it was planned already”.

He noted that the Istanbul peace deal, “had already been completely decided” in early April but, “Biden and Johnson promised volume military diplomatic assistance, allowing to defeat at least part of the Russian military and take a better negotiating position”.

This is the latest confirmation of the story initially reported in the outlet Ukrainska Pravda, which wrote at the time:

According to Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that there was a chance to “press him.”

Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine “had turned into a dead end”.

Ukrainian Canadian professor of political science, Ivan Katchanovski, recently documented the numerous diplomatic officials who confirmed this in his book, “The Russia-Ukraine War: Its Nature, Origins, and Outcome”, writing:

-Naftali Bennett said that the US and other Western leaders blocked the Ukraine-Russia peace deal, which he negotiated with Putin on Zelenskyy’s request in March 2022 when he was prime minister of Israel, and which according to him had about 50% chance of being reached, because they wanted to ‘continue to strike Putin’

-Davyd Arakhamia, the head of the Zelenskyy’s party faction in the Ukrainian parliament and the head of the Ukrainian delegation in the Ukraine-Russia talks independently confirmed that the peace deal could had been reached in spring 2022 if Ukraine agreed to neutrality and that the British prime-minister (Boris Johnson) blocked it. Arakhamia said that Russia was ready to end the war in such a case and that Ukrainian neutrality was the main Russian condition. He also said that Western countries knew everything concerning peace talks and told Zelenskyy not to sign the peace deal.

-Mevlut Cavusoglu, the foreign minister of Turkey, which hosted the peace talks in Istanbul, said on April 20, 2022 that Turkey ‘did not think that the Russia-Ukraine war would last that long after the peace talks in Istanbul’ ‘but following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that... there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia get weaker’

-Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan corroborated in 2024 the involvement of Boris Johnson in blocking the possible peace deal in spring 2022.

-Gerhard Schröder, the ex-leader of Germany, made in 2023 a similar statement, saying ‘At the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022 with Rustem Umerov (then Ukrainian negotiator) , the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans. I had two talks with Umerov, then a one on-one meeting with Putin, and then with Putin’s envoy. Umerov opened the conversation with greetings from Zelenskyy. As a compromise for Ukraine’s security guarantees, the Austrian model or the 5+1 model was proposed. Umerov thought that was a good thing. He also showed willingness on the other points. He also said that Ukraine does not want NATO membership. He also said that Ukraine wants to reintroduce Russian in the Donbass. But in the end, nothing happened. My impression was that nothing could happen, because everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal. Because the result will now be that Russia will be tied more closely to China, which the West should not want’.

-Victoria Nuland, who was at that time one of the top US State Department officials, stated in her interview in September 2024 that the Ukraine-Russia peace deal, which was close to being finalized in spring 2022, ‘fell apart’ because the US, the UK and other Western governments ‘advised’ the Zelenskyy government that it was not ‘a good deal.’

-Oleksii Arestovych, who was a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks in spring 2022, said after leaving his position as an adviser of Zelenskyy that this was the most advantageous ‘draft of agreement’ that Ukraine could have. He stated that the last round of the peace talks in Istanbul was ‘completely successful negotiation’ and that the Ukrainian delegation even opened a bottle of champagne afterwards. Arestovych also said that ‘the Istanbul agreement was a protocol of intentions and was completely/90% prepared for a direct meeting of Putin and Zelenskyy.’ Arestovych also stated that he ‘knew that in two or three weeks there would be a meeting in Istanbul, and it should end the war altogether. And then the meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin. All this was decided, there was a calendar… I knew exactly the calendar of Istanbul meetings, everything was moving towards reconciliation.’He elaborated that Russian representatives offered the talks on the first day of the invasion, that the Istanbul agreements were ‘fully acceptable,’ and that a meeting between Zelensky and Putin was supposed to be on April 9, 2022. The former Zelenskyy’s adviser and a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks stated that the talks ended because the West decided to use Ukraine as a trap to fight Putin’s Russia.

-Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected former editor of the pro-Western Ekho Moskvy radio station, which was banned following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, commenting on the Nuland’s admission in September 2024 confirmed that the peace treaty ‘was already initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation’ and said that ‘he saw this signature.’

-Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi, who participated in the peace talks with Russia in Spring 2022, stated that ‘we concluded’ the ‘Istanbul Communique’ and ‘were very close in... April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.’ He said that Putin ‘tried everything possible to conclude agreement with Ukraine.’ He noted that it was Putin’s ‘personal decision to accept the text of this communique.’

-source in Times on March 31, 2022, that the Johnson government ‘urged’ Ukraine not to ‘back down’ by accepting such peace deal under the terms negotiated in Istanbul and that the British prime minister ‘warned’ Zelenskyy in a phone call.

-Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, stated publicly that the West blocked a peace deal to end the Ukraine war in spring 2022 and used Ukraine for a proxy war with Russia in a failed strategy

While the Biden and Johnson administrations told Ukraine to abandon the deal and keep fighting to get a better deal, privately, they knew Ukraine would not win the war, and that the Istanbul deal would be more favorable to Ukraine.

Journalist Simon Shuster reported in Time magazine, “When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them”, adding:

“We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately.”

Eric Green went on to say that Biden achieved “victory” in Ukraine but added, “It’s unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it, because there is so much suffering for Ukraine and so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land”.

As Oleksii Arestovych noted in a separate interview :

The Russian side still insisted on peace initiatives. And the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good, an intermediary document... Now 200-300 thousand would be alive, probably, and half of Ukraine would not be destroyed and mined... They agreed to political discussions on Crimea... We made concessions, but the amount of their concessions was greater. This will never happen again, it won’t, they will push more and more

Now, due to the West blocking the Istanbul peace agreements, Ukraine is in a much weaker negotiating position, and at least one million Ukrainians and Russians are dead or severely wounded, all to serve the West’s goal of weakening Russia.

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