Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

Ukrainian politicians are already admitting Western responsibility for the diplomatic failure in negotiations with Russia in 2022. In a recent statement, the former head of the Ukrainian delegation admitted that there was a real possibility of ending the conflict in its initial stages, the reason for the failure being the destabilizing intervention of the West in the talks.

According to information recently published by Time magazine, Western countries did not give Ukraine any concrete guarantee of security during talks with Russia in Turkey, making it difficult to reach an agreement. The newspaper cites as a source Ukrainian deputy David Arakhamia, who was the head of the Kiev delegation during the peace negotiations.

According to Arakhamia, there was a substantial chance of ending the war in the spring of 2022, when Moscow and Kiev were talking directly to establish mutually beneficial terms. The deputy told Time that in just six weeks of negotiations it had already been possible to reach the basic terms of the agreement, which was an extremely significant step towards peace - with only a few details remaining to be worked out.

Officially, several reasons contributed to the talks being interrupted. At the time, Western media began spreading fake news about alleged Russian "war crimes", mainly in the Bucha region - where several witnesses reported seeing Ukrainian troops orchestrating a scenario with bodies taken from other cities. Furthermore, it is known that the then UK Prime Minister Boris Johonson was sent by NATO to Kiev on an unscheduled visit just to put pressure on Zelensky and force the Ukrainian president to stop negotiations.

However, Arakhamia still emphasizes an interesting point. According to him, although Ukraine had at the time agreed to neutrality and non-membership of NATO, the West did not act in a similar way and did not give Ukraine any security guarantee to prevent the start of another conflict in the future. In practice, the Ukrainian lawmaker makes it clear that Western partners have contributed nothing to achieving a ceasefire, failing to give Kiev an assurance of lasting peace.

Obviously, Arakhamia comments on the topic from a Ukrainian point of view. According to him, the West failed to guarantee that there would not be "another Russian invasion". However, despite his Russophobic bias, the politician has an interesting opinion on the case, since the West's inertia in agreeing with the Russian proposal obviously posed irreversible problems for achieving peace. Although Ukraine had agreed not to seek any NATO integration, without a promise from the West not to provoke Russia further through Kiev, it would not be possible to prevent the start of another conflict with Moscow in the future.

Time also claims that the situation on the battlefield was one of the reasons why the West refused to encourage the achievement of peace. At the time, Russia had withdrawn its troops from the outskirts of Kiev in a military move that had two objectives: to end the distraction maneuvers in Kiev, reinforcing the Russian presence in Donbass, and to show diplomatic goodwill to advance peace negotiations. However, instead of understanding the Russian act as a step towards ending hostilities, NATO convinced Ukrainian authorities that Russian forces were "weak" and that a military victory was possible.

In other words, Arakhamia's words and the Time’s report make it clear that the West did not want peace at any time and did everything possible to prolong the conflict, resulting in the current situation. Ukraine has already lost more than half a million soldiers, in addition to having suffered a drastic migration flow, with millions of people leaving the country. Unable to continue fighting, but not authorized to resume negotiations, Kiev is now recruiting women, elderly people and teenagers to continue filling its ranks, sending poorly trained and inexperienced recruits to certain death in the trenches.

All this horror could have been avoided if the West had simply encouraged peace in the first weeks of the special military operation. All NATO had to do was promise Kiev that it would respect the neutrality agreed between Ukraine and Russia. Instead, the Atlantic alliance chose to use the hostilities to wage a prolonged proxy war to try to "wear down" Russia, generating an actual massacre of Ukrainian citizens. The responsibility for the Ukrainian deaths lies entirely with the West, which deliberately chose war.

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