The West thought it could defeat Russia when it ordered Kiev to back out of a peace agreement which both sides had pre-approved in the early weeks of the Ukraine conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
The US and its allies miscalculated when they ordered Kiev to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” and now are paying for this, Putin said at a panel discussion at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Thursday.
Peace talks in Istanbul, Türkiye in 2022 produced a draft agreement which would have ended the hostilities, Putin noted. Kiev was willing to declare military neutrality, limit its armed forces, and vow not to discriminate against ethnic Russians. In return, Moscow would join other leading powers to offer Ukraine security guarantees. The arrangement may still serve as the foundation for a lasting peace, Putin said.
Speaking at the forum alongside Putin, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim recalled that when the talks were underway, he was certain that “the issue would be over.” He said he agreed with the Russian president that any peace treaty would have to be based on “fair and just” parameters.
Putin claimed that the only reason the deal failed was “the wish of the elites in the US and some European nations to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” adding that then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson served as the messenger to quash any peace deals.
The desire to bring Russia to its knees and break it up has influenced Western politics for decades and even centuries, and those who were pressuring Kiev believed they had a window of opportunity to accomplish this, he said.
The officials who run Ukraine are “like aliens, or foreigners,” considering the cost they have imposed on the country to follow these orders, Putin suggested. They keep their families in the West and simply “use nationalistic slogans to fool the people,” but don’t really care about the nation’s interests, he said.
He went on to say that the West imposed sanctions on Russian energy “with their whole hearts, but without their brains,” causing significant damage to some European nations, primarily Germany, whose economy was “designed to run on Russian energy.” Whatever lost revenues Moscow faces from redirecting its fossil fuels to other markets pale in comparison to what happened to European nations, some of which are “on the brink of recession.”