How about you impress us with your understanding of the text below?
https://www.thebureau.news/p/no-the-west-did-not-sabotage-an-early
"Of the many misrepresentations made by the Ottawa professor Katchanovski and other pro-Russian commentators, perhaps the most fundamental was the claim that a peace deal was close to being signed. This was not actually true.
While Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were
able to agree to some basic principles, the exact details were to be decided upon later, in an in-person meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy (which ultimately did not happen).
In any difficult negotiation, especially with high political stakes, agreeing upon broad principles is far easier than hammering out details.
While Ukrainian officials have stated that negotiators almost settled on a general framework, positioning that as a borderline peace deal is as dishonest as claiming that you’ve built a house after simply setting its foundations.
“We listened to them, and we realized that these are not people sent for talks but for our capitulation,” a senior Ukrainian negotiator recalled, the
Wall Street Journal reported."
There are good reasons to doubt that Zelensky and Putin would have settled on a compromise – mostly because the Russians were demanding that Ukraine limit its ability to defend itself by capping its armed forces at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces (accounting to roughly a 60-70 per cent reduction of Ukraine’s prewar military power).
...
Finally, the discovery of the Bucha massacre, wherein 450 Ukrainian civilians were found murdered in the Kyiv region, obliterated any public support for a negotiated peace. According to a May 2022 survey, 82 per cent of Ukrainians agreed that “under no circumstance should Ukraine give up on any of its territory even if it leads to the continuation of the war and threatens its independence.”
So of course Johnson said that Western allies were not ready to provide the guarantees outlined in the Istanbul framework – this was not coercion, it was simply an admission that the guarantees envisioned by the agreement were not feasible.
And of course he advised Zelenskyy
to keep fighting – this was not warmongering, but rather an acceptance of the fact that, in light of Russian atrocities in Bucha, there was no other choice.
The Istanbul framework was never going to work – and yet, over a year later, pro-Russian voices are still trying to twist the narrative to suit their interests, and some people are, unfortunately, gullible enough to believe them."
Now, please do go ahead and share with us your understanding about how Johnson talked the Ukrainians into rejecting a peace deal that never existed.
