Zelensky Denies That Boris Johnson Told Him Not to Sign Istanbul Peace Deal

Elvis Dunderhoff February 13, 2025

Yes, this particular bit of history was always going to need to be rewritten when the Ukraine finally surrendered.

If the Ukraine would have just signed that deal in 2022, which was incredibly unfavorable to Russia, they would have more of their precious territory, saved a million lives, and not destroyed all those buildings. Half their population wouldn’t have left as refugees.

There was no benefit whatsoever to the war, and there never could have been a benefit to the war (at least for the Ukraine; the argument from the West was that it benefited them to drain Russian resources).

The Guardian:

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rubbished claims that Boris Johnson scuppered a possible peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022, calling them “illogical” in an interview with the Guardian.

“There were several approaches with ultimatums and I never gave my approval for it,” said Zelenskyy of Russian demands for ending its full-scale invasion.

He actually did.

He said he was going to do the deal and then Johnson flew in.

This is a matter of historical fact.

Johnson had nothing to do with his decision, said Zelenskyy, directly addressing the claims for the first time: “It doesn’t fit with logic; what was he supposed to be talking us out of?”

…

The then British prime minister made a surprise visit to Kyiv in April 2022, six weeks after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. He walked through the streets of Kyiv with Zelenskyy and publicly affirmed British support for Ukraine.

The idea that Johnson also used the visit to ensure Ukraine did not sign a peace agreement with Russia first emerged in an article in the respected Ukrainska Pravda outlet in May 2022, which said that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators had agreed on a broad possible agreement after a meeting in Istanbul in late March.

A week later, Johnson arrived with a message that “Putin is a war criminal, he needs to be pressured, not negotiated with”, according to one of the outlet’s sources.

In November 2023, David Arakhamia, a member of Zelenskyy’s own negotiating team in Istanbul, appeared to lend the idea credence. “When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight,” he said in a November 2023 interview.

Russian sources seized on these words, ignoring another part of the interview in which Arakhamia had said the Ukrainian delegation had not planned to sign anything in any case. In an interview with Tucker Carlson last year, Putin brought up the story, claiming it showed the west had pushed Ukraine further into the war.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held several rounds of talks in Belarus and Turkey, but the conditions demanded by the Russians were always punishing, said Zelenskyy. “I said: ‘This cannot be. It violates the rights of our citizens, of the constitution. It would be a full betrayal. We will not submit to the ultimatums of Putin,’” Zelenskyy claimed.

Simon Shuster, a journalist who has written a biography of Zelenskyy, said he believed the Ukrainian president was serious in late March 2022 about trying to meet Putin and negotiate an end to the war based on a draft agreement reached in Istanbul.

It’s nice that Zelensky is taking the time to protect Boris Johnson and the British.

When this surrender becomes widely understood, he’s going to have a lot of his own problems to deal with.

© Copyright Daily Stormer 2025, All Rights Reserved -- Join the Daily Stormer site chat for future updates in case of further domain seizure.