Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has revealed that the West sabotaged the signing of an agreement by Ukraine that would terminate the war in the former Soviet Republic as early as 2022.
“The war could have ended as far back as April 2022, when a peace settlement was on the agenda,” Fico said on the state-run STVR TV channel on Saturday.
“However, the West prevented Ukraine from signing the agreement,” he added.
According to the Slovak premier Ukraine was headed for a potentially catastrophic future.
“[Ukraine] will never be in NATO and will have immense problems with joining the EU,” he said.
Fico added that Ukraine would lose a third of its territory as a result of the conflict and would be forced to agree to the presence of foreign troops.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions expressed Moscow’s readiness for talks with Kiev to end the protracted conflict in the country.
In a recent statement, Putin asserted that Russia has always been prepared for peace talks and even drafted a mutually acceptable agreement at the onset of the conflict.
However, he said that “external disruptions” deterred Ukraine from engaging in these negotiations.
Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, with the talks lasting for at least three hours.
The principles of their preliminary agreement included Ukraine’s commitment to a neutral and unaligned status, and its promise not to deploy foreign-made weapons, including nuclear ones, on its territory.
Russia was obligated to withdraw its forces from the Kiev and Chernigov regions but the settlement talks were frozen on the part of the Kiev government.
The Ukrainian side claimed that the decision was made on the advice of Boris Johnson, who was Britain’s prime minister at the time.
US President Donald Trump, who has for long boasted of his political clout to put an end to the Ukraine war, threatened Russia with tariff hikes and more sanctions on Wednesday if Moscow did not agree to a ceasefire deal with Kiev.
Trump also claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had told him he wanted a peace agreement to end the war.
Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine in February 2022 partly to prevent NATO’s eastward expansion after warning that the US-led military alliance was following an “aggressive line” against Moscow.
Washington and its Western allies have flooded Ukraine with a vast volume of Western arms and ammunition since then despite Moscow’s calls that the move would only prolong the conflict.
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