Has the US finally succeeded in choking off Russia's biggest trade lifeline?
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'Let's Just Fight': How Britain Prefers War Over Peace In Ukraine
Boris Johnson avoided promoting a compromise peace in Ukraine after Russia invaded. Now, Labour continues to help prolong the conflict to secure British interests.
By Mark Curtis | September 9, 2024
Last week, defence secretary John Healey announced that the UK "will continue to step up our support to help Ukraine achieve victory" in its war with Russia.
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'Let's Just Fight': How Britain Prefers War Over Peace In Ukraine
Boris Johnson avoided promoting a compromise peace in Ukraine after Russia invaded. Now, Labour continues to help prolong the conflict to secure British interests.
By Mark Curtis | September 9, 2024
Last week, defence secretary John Healey announced that the UK "will continue to step up our support to help Ukraine achieve victory" in its war with Russia.
Both he and foreign secretary David Lammy have repeatedly said "Labour will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes to win".
When President Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukrainian forces conducted an incursion into Russia's Kursk region last month, Healey praised the move as "bold", saying it put Russian president Vladimir Putin "under pressure".
Equipment used in that offensive included UK-supplied Challenger tanks sent to Ukraine last year.
Prime minister Keir Starmer has also told Zelensky he is willing to allow Ukraine's use of UK-supplied long-range missiles to hit targets inside Russia – provided the US agrees to it.
Despite Labour’s public relations about "change" during the general election, Lammy has consistently said that "with Labour there will be no change in the UK's financial, military, diplomatic and political support for Ukraine".
The consequences of this are hard to overstate. Since Russia's brutal invasion, inflicting untold misery on millions of Ukrainians, bombarding civilians and committing war crimes, UK governments have been overwhelmingly focused on one thing – "winning" the war.
Yet one thing Whitehall has conspicuously avoided is making serious attempts at promoting a compromise peace that would end the fighting.
Indeed, one casualty of Ukraine's recent incursion into Russia is that it derailed secret talks to negotiate an agreement halting strikes on energy and power infrastructure, according to the Washington Post.
There are specific reasons Whitehall prefers war over peace in Ukraine. It is worth going back to the very first chance negotiators had to end this devastating conflict soon after Russia invaded.
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Scuppering peace prospects
There is considerable evidence showing the UK helped scupper the prospects for peace within a few weeks of Russia's invasion in February 2022.
The following month, direct peace negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian delegations and mediation efforts by the then Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, created a genuine chance for ending the war peacefully.
Meeting in Turkey, the two sides produced the Istanbul communiqué in late March 2022 in which Ukraine promised not to join Nato or allow foreign military bases on its soil. For its part, Russia promised to withdraw its occupation troops from Ukraine, although not from the Donbas region or the Crimea.
David Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky's "Servant of the People" party who led Ukraine’s delegation in the talks, later revealed that Moscow was "ready to end the war if we took neutrality… and made commitments that we would not join Nato".
"This was the key point", he said in an interview in 2023.
Reports suggest Zelensky was then prepared to give up Nato membership and that he understood this was the key issue for Moscow. "And as far as I remember, they started a war because of this", he said at the time.
'Permanent neutrality'
Russia and Ukraine appeared relatively close to a deal that would "have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU", according to one detailed study.
Naftali Bennett said in an interview last year that "both sides were very interested in a ceasefire… and both sides were prepared to make considerable concessions…. But Britain and the US, in particular, wanted this peace process to end and set their sights on a continuation of the war."
The comment was echoed by Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu who organised the Istanbul meeting. He told CNN that "there are those within the Nato member states that want the war to continue". "They want Russia to become weaker", he added.
"The Western countries saw the Russians bleeding and saw it as an opportunity to strengthen Nato", observed Eyal Hulata, Israel's former national security adviser who was also involved in the mediation attempts.
'Keep fighting and dying'
In their summit in Brussels on 24 March 2022, Nato decided to oppose peace negotiations until Russia had fully withdrawn all its troops from Ukraine.
By early April, the Washington Post was reporting that "For some in Nato, it's better for Ukrainians to keep fighting and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too soon or at too high a price for Kyiv and the rest of Europe."
Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who acted as one of the mediators in the Istanbul talks, later said that "nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington…. the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed."
Nonetheless the peace talks did continue and another Ukrainian involved, Oleksiy Arestovych, a spokesperson for Zelensky, later said progress towards an agreement went so far that “we opened the champagne bottle”.
He said in an interview that 90% of an agreement was "prepared for directly meeting Putin" as the “next step in the negotiations".
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Enter Boris Johnson
As talks were approaching a possible agreement, UK prime minister Boris Johnson arrived unannounced in Kyiv on 9 April 2022.
A report in Ukrainska Pravda noted that Johnson brought two messages: "The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with", and "the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements or guarantees, they [the collective West] are not".
Before his visit, Johnson "instructed" Zelensky "not to make any concessions to Putin", columnist Simon Jenkins wrote in the Guardian.
David Arakhamia said that Johnson had come to Kyiv to inform Ukrainian officials the West wouldn't sign any agreement with Moscow, instead urging: "let's just fight."
Please go to Declassified UK to continue reading.
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Inside Russia's denazification of Ukraine although Nazi is probably a bit of a misnomer. The term Nazi was the creation of a Jew living in Germany in 1939 used to disparage German National Socialism. How it came to be equated to hating Jews and antisemitism is anyone's guess.
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