I thought it would be useful to set down some of the evidence for the argument that peace negotiations to end the Russian-Ukraine war in spring 2022 were close to being agreed, and that the UK-US tried (and possibly succeeded) to scupper them:

In an interview with CNN Turk on April 2022 Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who organised the Istanbul negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, noted “there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker.” (Middle East Monitor, 21 April 2022)

In May 2022 the Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, citing “sources close to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy,” reported UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson “appeared in the capital [Kyiv] almost without warning” on 9 April, bringing “two simple messages.” “The first is that [Russian President Vladimir] 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 on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”

According to the Ukrainska Pravda – described by Encyclopædia Britannica as “one of Ukraine’s most-respected news sites” – “Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to ‘press him.’” (Ukrainska Pravda, 5 May 2022)

Writing in the September/October 2022 issue of the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine after having spoken to “multiple former senior US officials”, Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist in the Bush and Obama Administrations, and Angela Stent, an ex-Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the US National Intelligence Council, noted “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement” in April 2022. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, where it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.” (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022)

In February 2023 former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who acted as an intermediary between Russian and Ukraine in early 2022, said “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire” but the West “blocked it”. (Jacobin, 8 February 2023)

Speaking to the Berliner Zeitung newspaper in October 2023, ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who was involved in the peace negotiations, also noted the US refused to accept a deal as it wanted to “keep the Russians down”. (bne IntelliNews, 24 October 2023)

According to former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovich, who also took part in the talks, “the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good.” While Ukraine “made concessions,” he said, “the amount of their [Russia’s] concessions was greater. This will never happen again.” The Ukraine war, Arestovich concluded, “could have ended with the Istanbul agreements, and several hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive.” (Aaron Mate, 2 March 2025)

“Russia’s goal was to put pressure on us so that we would accept neutrality,” David Arakhamia, head of President Zelensky’s party in the Ukrainian parliament, and also the head of the Ukrainian delegation at peace talks with Russia in Belarus and Turkey in early 2022, explained in a November interview. “This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality… and we would give an obligation that we would not join NATO.” “Everything else,” according to Arakhamia, “was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification,’ the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah.” He also noted Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv in April 2022 to say the UK would not sign anything with the Russians and “let’s just fight” (Arakhamia has since claimed what he said about the former UK Prime Minister has been distorted by Russia). (Responsible Statecraft, 4 December 2023)

“We managed to find a very real compromise,” Oleksandr Chalyi, a senior member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, recalled in December 2023. “We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” Putin, he added, “tried to do everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine.” (New York Times, 15 June 2024, and Aaron Mate, 2 March 2025)

On the conflict being a proxy war for the US-NATO:

Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA under President Barack Obama, explained in March 2022 that the conflict is “a proxy war with Russia whether we say so or not.” (Bloomberg Television, 17 March 2022)

In April 2022 the former supreme allied commander of NATO General Philip Breedlove  stated in an interview “I think we are in a proxy war with Russia. We are using the Ukrainians as our proxy forces.” (New Statesman, 21 January 2023)

Asked whether the US aims had shifted since February 2022, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told a press conference in Poland in late April 2022 US supported Ukraine in retaining its sovereignty and defending its territory, before adding a second, previously unstated, goal: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” (Guardian, 25 April 2022)

Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, concurs with this “proxy war” framing, writing in May 2022 “For NATO, the payoff has been damaging some of the most important parts of the Russian military – its ground and mechanized forces, its airborne units, its special operations forces – so badly that it may take them years to recover.” (Bloomberg UK, 1 May 2022)

In November 2024 former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told The Telegraph ‘Ukraine: The Latest’ podcast, “Mate, let’s face it. We’re waging a proxy war.” (Twitter, 29 November 2024)

In March 2025 Eric Michael Swalwell, US Representative for California’s 14th congressional district, said US involvement in the war “has decimated [Russia’s] military and economy.” He calls this “the greatest return on investment for any military expenditure ever, and as far as the return on investment for soldiers’ lives, it’s infinity, because you can’t divide zero.” (CNN, 3 March 2025)

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