Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Sistema project released an investigation on November 4 detailing Russia’s initial 2022 demands for Ukraine’s total capitulation, further supporting ISW’s long-standing assessment that Russia has never been willing to engage in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine on any terms but its own. RFE/RL reported on November 4 that it obtained a draft of the treaty that Russia offered to Ukraine on March 7, 2022, entitled “Treaty on the Settlement of the Situation in Ukraine and the Neutrality of Ukraine.” The draft document includes seven provisions, all of which amount to Ukraine’s complete surrender and disarmament and the abandonment of its sovereignty, lands, and people. The document calls for Ukraine to reduce its army from nearly 197,000 personnel to 50,000 personnel, which RFE/RL notes would have meant that the Ukrainian army would be smaller than the Belarusian army, despite the fact that the Belarusian population in 2022 was one-fifth of the Ukrainian population. The document also states that Ukraine would not be able to develop, produce, buy, or deploy missile systems with a range of more than 250 kilometers; that Ukraine would have to recognize occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as independent Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) and cede parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that Ukraine still controlled in March 2022; that Ukraine would have to commit to the financial costs of rebuilding parts of the Donbas that Russia had destroyed following its initial 2014 invasion; that Ukraine and the international community would lift all sanctions and cancel all lawsuits that had been levied against Russian since 2014; that Ukraine would grant the Russian language the status of a “state language” and restore all property rights of the Kremlin-controlled Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate; and that Ukraine would re-legalize Soviet and communist symbols. In essence, Moscow was asking Ukraine to willingly give up its military, its offensive and defensive capabilities, its land, a significant portion of its population and economic capacity, and cease protecting its language, history, and culture.
The Kremlin has been incessant in its claims that it set out to negotiate in March 2022 (after illegally invading Ukraine) but that it was Ukraine and the collective West that destroyed the prospect of negotiations. The RFE/RL investigation supports ISW’s long-standing assessment that this was never the case, however, and that Russia never intended to negotiate in good faith with Ukraine. Russia presented outrageous demands calling for Ukraine to surrender its security and sovereignty, knowing that Ukraine would (rightly) refuse to do so, and then blamed Ukraine for the supposed “failure” of negotiations. ISW continues to assess that Russia has constructed a narrative around the concept of negotiations that it is using in an effort to encourage the West to make concessions on Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the RFE/RL investigation emphasizes that Russia’s “diplomatic” engagements with Ukraine and the West since the full-scale invasion have always been oriented around this destructive objective.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-4-2024
Comment: So this was the Kremlin’s peace plan back in March 2022. It was a demand for total capitulation. But it doesn’t end there. Recently Lavrov made this statement at a conference:
“Stability in [Europe] as part of Eurasia continent will only be achieved under condition of providing reliable long term security guarantees. Well for example as they were presented in our December 2021 initiatives.”
What was in that December 2021 initiative? It was an ultimatum to the West demanding that NATO give up on all countries that joined it after 1997, which is the entirety of Central and Eastern Europe, including the Baltic States, and they demanded the West leave Ukraine and Georgia to Russia’s exclusive sphere of influence.
None of this surprises me. I had a ringside seat to the collapse of the Soviet Union and what happened in the Kremlin in the days after that collapse. Initially, the communist apparatchiki running the government vanished. Academics from the Soviet and Russian Academy of Sciences immediately filled the void to keep things running. They knew their stuff, but they were new to arts of political warfare. Within weeks, many of the old communist apparatchiki started filtering back displacing the academics. Along with the apparatchiki, came some of the siloviki from the old communist regime. Putin was among them. So the Soviet Union collapsed, but the same old reds were left running the store. Thus my title. The Russian Federation is nothing new. It’s remnant Soviet Union. Even the leaders are the same, just the next generation. And they long for what the Soviet Union once had.
TTG
