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Russia-Ukraine Peace Treaty of 2022
Russia-Ukraine signed peace treaty exists, Vladimir Putin claims. He showed the document
It is hard to imagine a document whose content has caused so much insinuation and political manipulation as the draft Russian-Ukrainian peace treaty of 2022. No one has ever seen the full text of this treaty, nor have Russia and Ukraine commented on it. Negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022, as many thought, could bring the long-awaited peace to both sides and their details were never disclosed.
However, in the second half of spring the negotiation process came to a standstill because of mutual distrust and insoluble contradictions. The prospect of peace talks became even more elusive after Russia annexed Ukrainian regions in September, 2022 and began systematic attacks on civilian energy infrastructure, which Russian authorities intended to force Ukraine to an agreement on their terms. At the same time, Ukraine’s Western allies emphasized their readiness to support it for as long as necessary and insisted that it was up to the Ukrainian leaders to decide whether to resume the negotiation process.
Against this background, the news that Vladimir Putin showed a draft of the Russian-Ukrainian treaty was a real sensation.
The Russian president accused Ukraine of signing a peace treaty with Moscow to end the ongoing war saying that Kyiv later threw it into the “garbage of history”. The Russian leader’s comments were made during a meeting with African Union leaders led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at St. Petersburg’s Konstantinovsky Palace. The meeting was attended by the leaders of South Africa, Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, Uganda, the Republic of Congo and the Comoros. These leaders had previously visited the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where they met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Vladimir Putin claimed that in the spring of 2022 — during the initial phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a peace treaty was initialed by the representatives of the two countries in Istanbul, as Turkey hosted a series of negotiations aimed at developing “trust” between the two sides.
It was called the “Treaty of permanent neutrality and security guarantees of Ukraine,” Putin said, after flapping the supposed draft of the document in air, stating: “We…
