Leaked documents show that at the beginning of the war, the Kremlin and Kiev were willing to consider a diplomatic solution. Although they could not come to an agreement at the time, it seems that the chance for the parties to sit down at the negotiating table is not yet lost.
In the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, the Russian Air Force carried out strikes on various targets across Ukraine. At the same time, infantry and armor poured into the country from the north, east and south. In the days that followed, the Russians tried to encircle Kiev.
These were the first weeks of the invasion, when it still looked like Russia could take Ukraine in a blitzkrieg. Looking back, it seems almost a miracle that it didn’t turn out that way.
What happened on the battlefield is relatively easy to understand. Less understandable is the simultaneous intensive diplomatic activity of Moscow, Kiev and several other actors, which could have led to an agreement just a few weeks after the outbreak of the war, writes Samuel Charap, RAND Corporation’s senior staff member, and Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
By the end of March 2022, a series of face-to-face meetings in Belarus and Turkey and virtual discussions via video conference resulted in the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, which described the framework for resolving the conflict.
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators then began working on the text of the treaty and made significant progress toward an agreement. However, the negotiations broke down in May.
The war continues today and since then has claimed tens of thousands of lives on both sides.
What happened? How close were the parties to ending the war? And why were they never able to finalize the agreement?
To shed light on this critical episode of the war, the authors examined draft agreements exchanged between the two sides. They also interviewed several participants in the negotiations, as well as key Western government officials at the time, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In addition, a number of contemporaneous and recent interviews and statements with Ukrainian and Russian officials serving during the negotiations were reviewed. Most of these are available on YouTube in Russian or Ukrainian – so they are not widely known in the West.
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