Since the beginning of the disaster of the Ukrainian counter-offensive against the Russian troops, followed by the understanding by the Western partners of the bankruptcy of their project on the territory of Ukraine, the power in Kiev has been confronted with an appalling reality: the refusal of the continuation of the investments coming from the sources which previously ensured them to be imperishable – the beginning of the end of the reign of Zelensky and his entourage.
Yet such an ending was perfectly predictable. Only ignorance of history and the doctrinal modus operandi of the protagonists condemns us to its repetition. In my analysis a year ago, “The war in Ukraine: the real reasons for the conflict”, I already mentioned the building blocks of Kiev’s future defeat:
“When the time comes, when the American authorities consider that the “return on investment” in the war in Ukraine is sufficient, or when they realise that the probability of reaching the satisfaction threshold is too low, they will abandon the regime in Kiev. It will abandon it in the same way that Ghani’s Afghan regime was abandoned and the Kurds in Iraq and Syria were abandoned after they had partially accomplished the missions assigned to them by America in return for the promise of the creation of a Kurdish state. A promise that only committed those who listened to it.
As a result, and given that despite the pressure of unprecedented Western sanctions Russia still has healthy public finances, negligible debt, a surplus trade balance and no budget deficit – the conflict in Ukraine cannot fail to be lost by the Russians, in one form or another.
What’s more, for the Russian Federation this is an existential issue; for the United States of America, as already mentioned, it is not“.
The Russians’ initial intentions
The pseudo-experts in the Western camp have found only one response to justify their serious lack of vision, anticipation and assessment of Moscow’s potential: to repeat the mantras about Russia’s powerlessness to continue fighting the war, given that it has held its ground and made little progress on the frontline for a year.
Their analytical short-sightedness does not allow them to perceive the disturbing reality. If the Russian Federation took the unilateral initiative at the start of the war to propose the signing of the peace agreement that was to take place in Istanbul, at a time when it was undeniably in a position of strength, even from the point of view of the “Atlanticist” camp – this can only mean one thing: by the time it entered the negotiations, Moscow had already obtained satisfaction in terms of territorial gains (the pro-Russian territories recovered from Ukraine) and all that remained was to obtain from Kiev a commitment on its neutrality status vis-à-vis NATO, i.e. a legal assurance that the armed forces of the enemy camp would not be present on the territory of the buffer state that Ukraine has become for Russia since 1991.
Today, Russia remains steadfastly stationed in its positions on the frontline and is content to exhaust the last remaining material and human resources of the Ukrainian army. This is neither a sign of weakness nor, even less, a coincidence.
The Ukrainian-Western theories that Russia has set its sights on the disappearance of the Ukrainian state as a state entity are, quite simply, fanciful and merely reflect the disconcerting amateurism of their authors. The events that took place in Istanbul at the start of the war are proof of this: if Moscow’s objective was the disappearance of Ukraine, it would never have come to the negotiating table on its own initiative at the very start of the war, when it dominated the situation on the ground and when its troops were positioned in the suburbs of Kiev, which were in a state of chaos. These troops were only withdrawn as a gesture of goodwill when the Ukrainian side signed the Istanbul agreement. Signature followed by cancellation instead of ratification.
The revelation
Twenty months have passed since the events mentioned above. At the end of November 2023, a highly controversial figure on the Ukrainian political scene came to the fore in the Ukrainian media and made revelations that had a bombshell effect on Ukrainian public opinion. This revelation is considered by the community of independent Ukrainian experts to be the most scandalous of the current year.
In an interview given to the Ukrainian television channel ‘1+1’ by David Arakhamia, none other than the head of the parliamentary faction of the ‘Servant of the People’ party (V. Zelensky’s political party), he spoke of the circumstances of the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that took place in Istanbul in March-May 2022, in which he headed the Ukrainian delegation.
Arakhamia remembers the Russians’ position at the time: “They hoped almost to the last that we would accept neutrality. That was their main objective. They were prepared to end the war if we accepted neutrality – as Finland had done in the past – and if we undertook not to join NATO“.
He also mentioned that “security advisers” from Washington, London, Warsaw and Berlin had access to all the documents discussed on the negotiating table.
Speaking of the reasons for cancelling the agreement, he mentioned only one serious one – Boris Johnson’s visit to Kiev: “…Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said, ‘We’re not going to sign anything with them. We’re simply going to go to war”.
It should be noted that the parliamentarian did not say a single word about Boutcha. And let’s not forget that the only official version from Kiev and the “Atlanticist” camp at the time of the reason for halting talks with the Russians and cancelling the Istanbul agreement was the alleged “massacre of the civilian population perpetrated by Russian troops in Boutcha”.
This illustrious character ends his interview with great pride in having fooled the Russian delegation: “We accomplished our mission of dragging things out with a score of 8 out of 10. They (the Russians) relaxed, left – and we took the direction of the military solution”.
This televised revelation brought home to the Ukrainian public the reality of a war that could easily have been halted in its early stages, and that it was only on the direct initiative of the collective West via its emissary Boris Johnson that it was forcibly relaunched, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian deaths and even more seriously wounded and maimed, as well as the almost total destruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure, which will take decades to recover to pre-war levels, which were already quite deplorable.
The recall
Being the opposite of everything that had been served up by the unparalleled state propaganda apparatus operating in Ukraine and Western countries for nearly two years, the information revealed at the end of November 2023 caused a real stupefaction among the Ukrainian masses who had previously been formatted and indoctrinated by narratives of an entirely different nature.
However, for minds not blinded by ‘NATO’ narratives, things have been blatantly obvious from the start of the current conflict.
During my interview in May 2023 for the French publication “L’Éclaireur des Alpes“, this reality was already mentioned not as one of the probabilities, but as the only evidence with immediate consequences:
“L’Éclaireur – But didn’t Russia underestimate the Ukrainians’ ability to resist?
Oleg Nesterenko – Remember the serious assessments that were made of Ukraine’s ability to maintain resistance against Russia. At the time, just before the outbreak of war, it was estimated that Ukraine could only hold out against Russia for a very limited time.
Contrary to what is being reported in the Western mass media, and despite what is happening on the ground, I would like to stress that those experts who predicted that Ukraine would only be able to hold out for a limited time were not at all wrong. They were not at all wrong in their predictions.
My words may seem surprising in the light of what we’ve been observing for over a year. But there’s no need to be surprised. We must never forget that the active phase of hostilities was launched at the end of February 2022 and that talks between Ukraine and Russia were already taking place in Istanbul at the end of March 2022. Why would a party that feels strong and knows it still has considerable capacity for resistance sit down around a negotiating table to agree a form of surrender? It never happens that way. The Ukrainians went to the negotiating table knowing that their capacity for resistance was very limited.
In Istanbul, when the two parties reached a consensus on the majority of the key elements of the agreement on the cessation of hostilities, when they were practically one step away from ratifying the peace agreement document, there was a 180-degree turn on the Ukrainian side. Why did this happen? You don’t need much business experience to know: In negotiations, when one of the two parties does an about-face from one day to the next, it only means one thing – that party has had a counter-proposal from the other party’s competitors. That’s how it works in the business world. It’s the same in politics.
If Ukraine was able to afford the luxury of writing off the peace agreement, it was simply because it received a counter-proposal. And this counter-proposal could only come from the Western camp. The events that followed revealed the elements of this proposal: Ukraine received a proposal to open a gigantic line of credit partly payable in arms. In return, Ukraine was to undertake to refrain from concluding a war-stopping agreement with Russia and to supply the fighting “manpower”. That was the agreement.
In order to meet Kiev’s second commitment, Ukraine’s national borders for leaving the country were closed. In France, we don’t talk about it much – because it’s too embarrassing a truth – but at the start of the war there was a gigantic exodus of people from the Ukrainian territories, particularly the male population. The men knew that if they didn’t leave, they would be sent to the slaughter. When people talk about Ukrainian heroism on Western television, it makes me smile, knowing full well that the country would have been emptied of future fighters in a very short space of time if the borders hadn’t been closed”.
Capitulation and the transfer of responsibilities
In this interview with David Arakhamia, one of the key figures in Ukrainian politics today, he talks about a number of issues, including the need to hold a national referendum on the question of possible territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for the peace agreement.
The significance of this statement is of strategic importance: the Kiev regime is not only preparing to capitulate to public opinion in the country, but also, and above all, to shift onto the shoulders of the Ukrainian people, who have been suffering for almost two years now, the responsibility for the disastrous policies put in place by the American-centric Western camp, which have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and devastated the country.
So it is not the current regime, but the so-called people, who will have to decide whether to stop the war or lose their national territory.
Oleg Nesterenko
Translation: Яннис В.Зброек
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