Early Peace Plan Shows Russia's Intent To Neutralize Ukraine

Early in peace talks that began days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow proposed a treaty whose one-sided conditions amounted to Kyiv's surrender, according to a draft obtained by Systema, RFE/RL's Russian investigative unit.

Acceptance of the proposal would have left Ukraine a neutral nation with a tiny, toothless army, no recourse to protection by NATO states, and no chance of regaining control over Crimea or the Donbas, where it would have had to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in their entirety, including the large portions still under Kyiv's control at the time.

The proposed pact sheds light on Russian President Vladimir Putin's goals in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, none of which he has publicly renounced, and which he has repeatedly asserted will be achieved. It comes as the all-out war heads toward its fourth year with no clear sign of an end in sight but amid indications that peace talks could potentially be in the cards in 2025 or later.

The draft -- titled Treaty On The Resolution Of The Situation In Ukraine And The Neutrality Of Ukraine -- is dated March 7, 2022, 11 days after Russia launched the invasion and a week after talks between Ukraine and Russia began.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators meet in the Belavezha forest in Belarus on March 7, 2022.

Composed in Moscow and handed to the Ukrainian delegation that day, at the third round of talks, in a town in the Belavezha forest in Belarus, it is the first known document laying out Russia's conditions for a peace deal after the start of the full-scale invasion.

Systema obtained the draft from a Ukrainian source familiar with the negotiations, and a Russian source close to the talks confirmed its authenticity. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The talks began on February 28, 2022, at a time when Russian forces had seized swaths of territory in the south, east, and north of Ukraine, where they had advanced close to Kyiv after pouring across the border from Russia and Belarus. Some sessions were held in person, others online.

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The process petered out in late April of the same year, as the sides wrangled over major points of dispute and following revelations of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha, a city outside Kyiv that the invading forces had abandoned as they withdrew from northern Ukraine after failing to capture the capital or force Ukraine's capitulation.

'Not Neutrality, But Neutralization'

The Russian proposal sets out terms for Ukraine's neutrality, a status Kyiv appeared ready to accept at the time. But Eric Ciaramella, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Putin seems to have been seeking "something more radical -- not neutrality, but the neutralization of Ukraine as an independent state. Russia's goal from the very beginning was to destroy Ukraine's ability to defend itself."

A country "can be neutral and have a very strong army and be capable of self-defense…. But that's not what Russia had in mind here," he said.

"The document was structured as if Ukraine were the aggressor defeated on the battlefield, which, of course, did not reflect reality," Ciaramella said of the Russian draft dated March 7, 2022, which he read at Systema's request. "It's hard to say whether this was a genuine attempt to negotiate, as such terms would be unacceptable to any Ukrainian. They would have neutralized Ukraine to the point of making it defenseless."

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The draft called for Ukraine to shrink its army to no more than 50,000 personnel, about five times fewer than it had in 2022, and would have barred Ukraine from developing or deploying missiles with a range of over 250 kilometers. Moscow would have been able to prohibit other types of weapons in the future.

It also called for the removal of all sanctions imposed on Russia by Ukraine or the West since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas.

Ukraine would have been forced to formally recognize Crimea as Russian and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as independent. Kyiv would have had to pay for reconstruction in the Donbas.

'Deeply Erroneous Logic'

The pact would have left a truncated Ukraine highly vulnerable, with Russian forces remaining in place and no way for Kyiv to defend itself or seek Western security support.

Documents from later stages of the talks, including treaty drafts from March 17 and April 15 that were published by The New York Times earlier this year, show that the sides drew closer on some issues as the talks progressed -- and as Ukraine beat back Moscow's forces in the north.

Crimea's status would have been left for future negotiations, for example, and Russian demands for changes in legislation involving languages and thorny historical disputes faded into the background. Crucially, the sides were discussing security guarantees for Ukraine that would include Western nations, though how they would work was a major bone of contention.

However, Ciaramella suggested that in fundamental ways, little had changed.

"The versions discussed a few weeks later in Istanbul and at virtual sessions were still based on the deeply erroneous Russian logic that permeated the initial text," he told Systema. "Had the treaty been signed, its final form in April would have been merely a softer version of Ukrainian capitulation."

The subsequent drafts still included some of Russia's key demands, such as a permanent bar on NATO membership for Ukraine, something that neither Kyiv nor the Western alliance is prepared to accept. NATO has repeatedly said that Ukraine will eventually join, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been seeking a swift invitation as part of a "victory plan" he has presented to Ukrainians and the country's backers abroad in recent weeks.

In at least one way, meanwhile, Russia's stated conditions for peace have grown more aggressive than they were on March 7, 2022.

In September of that year, Putin claimed that five Ukrainian regions – Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson -- were now inalienable parts of Russia. The baseless claim included the portions of those regions that remained, and still remain, in Kyiv's hands, and Putin has said that Russian control over those territories is a requirement for any peace negotiations.

Adapted from the original Russian by Steve Gutterman