Ukraine-Russia talks fell apart after Kiev asked foreign backers for advice, the former US deputy secretary of state has said

The US, UK and other backers of Ukraine told Kiev to reject the deal reached at the 2022 Istanbul peace talks with Russia, former US under secretary of state Victoria Nuland has said.

In an interview with Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, former editor-in-chief of the liberal news channel Dozhd, which aired on Thursday, Nuland was asked to comment on reports that the peace process between Moscow and Kiev in late March and early April 2022 collapsed after then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Ukraine and told Vladimir Zelensky to keep fighting.

“Relatively late in the game the Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going and it became clear to us, clear to the Brits, clear to others that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on,” she said of the deal being discussed by the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Türkiye’s largest city.

The proposed agreement included limits on the kinds of weapons that Kiev could possess, as a result of which Ukraine “would basically be neutered as a military force,” while there were no similar constraints on Russia, the former diplomat explained.

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“People inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart,” Nuland said.

The veteran diplomatic hawk, who during her time in the State Department was renowned for her hostility towards Russia, quit the post of under secretary of state for political affairs in March this year. Nuland played a key role in the violent Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, which toppled Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovich.

During the escalation between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022, she called for deeper US involvement in the conflict and advocated for Ukraine to be armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons. However, in February, the 63-year-old essentially acknowledged the failure of her longstanding policy of containing Moscow, telling the CNN that modern Russia had turned out to be “not the Russia we wanted.”

During her conversation with Zygar, Nuland confirmed that both Moscow and Kiev were eager to seek a diplomatic solution a month after the outbreak of the fighting.

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“Russia had an interest at that time in at least seeing what it could get. Ukraine, obviously, had an interest if they could stop the war and get and get Russia out,” she said.

US officials “were not in the room” during the talks in Istanbul, only offering Kiev “support” in case it were needed, she claimed.

Putin said last week that the only reason the Istanbul deal failed was because of “the wish of the elites in the US and some European nations to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” adding that Boris Johnson served as the messenger to quash the peace process.

The negotiations in Türkiye yielded a draft agreement, which would have ended the hostilities, Putin recalled. Kiev was willing to declare military neutrality, limit its armed forces, and vow not to discriminate against ethnic Russians. In return, Moscow would have joined other leading powers in offering Ukraine security guarantees, he stressed.

According to the Russian leader, talks with Kiev are still possible, but can only happen “not on the basis of some ephemeral demands but on the basis of the documents that were agreed and actually initialized in Istanbul.”