Ukrainian lawmaker Alexey Goncharenko, who was recently placed on Myrotvorets’ de facto “kill list” for floating a detailed peace proposal, confirmed the Financial Times’ report last month alleging that Zelensky rejected a peace deal with Russia in early 2023. According to him, the terms would have essentially mirrored those of spring 2022’s peace talks that were sabotaged at the time by the UK (and Poland), which is very generous if true since it would have entailed significant compromises by Putin:
“Russia withdraws its troops from most of the four oblasts it had just declared ‘annexed.’; The new line of demarcation runs roughly along the line as of February 24, 2022: Crimea and the part of Donbas that Russia controlled before the full-scale invasion; Ukraine recognizes Russian control over Crimea; Ukraine grants Russia an unobstructed land corridor to Crimea; The ceasefire regime is guaranteed by NATO countries that provide protection for Ukraine; Russia begins negotiations with the US on its own security guarantees.”
Leaving aside the veracity of this hitherto undisclosed peace deal that Goncharenko presented himself as having corroborated, the importance rests less in whether all the details are true and more in the fact that Zelensky is now faced with much worse terms nearly four years later after rejecting those putative ones. The timing of these claims by the Financial Times and one of his country’s own lawmakers, neither of which friendly to Russia by any measure, couldn’t have been worse for Zelensky.
“Trump Is More Serious Than Ever About Cutting Deals With Putin”, part of the reason being that he wants to tap into “The Five Most Promising Russian-US Economic Opportunities”, to which end he and Elon Musk are suspected of having throttled Starshield and Starlink respectively to pressure Zelensky. Given the indispensability of these satellite communication systems to Ukraine’s war effort, the message sent was that they could let the frontlines collapse if he doesn’t soon agree to a peace deal with Putin.
The grand trade-off could include freezing the frontlines in exchange for a US-brokered energy deal between Russia, the EU, and Ukraine as the quid pro quo for the Kremlin allowing the deployment of European peacekeepers to Ukraine without the US’ Article 5 protection. Other issues like the size of Ukraine’s post-war armed forces and the rights of its Russian minority would be discussed later. Putin might already be onboard, but Zelensky certainly isn’t, ergo why Trump has had to pressure him.
Zelensky fatefully decided to keep fighting in spring 2022 at the cost of an unknown number of Ukrainian lives that’s nevertheless estimated to be significant, but instead of accepting basically the same terms a year later, he thought that he’d get better ones after that summer’s counteroffensive. It ultimately failed, after which he probably could have returned to the aforesaid terms, but he then decided to keep fighting indefinitely despite the military-strategic dynamics having resolutely shifted against Ukraine since then.
So many Ukrainians have died because Zelensky remains deluded with dreams of inflicting a strategic defeat upon Russia, thus resulting in a sunk-cost fallacy that combined with the conflict’s profitability to indefinitely perpetuate it at an unthinkable cost to his country. If Trump has the political will, then he can cut Ukraine off to force Zelensky into peace and therefore save the country from him, otherwise this will remain a forever war that’ll kill countless more Ukrainians. It’s up to Trump whether that’ll happen.
