Eurasia Press & News
Boris Johnson avoided promoting a compromise peace in Ukraine after Russia invaded. Now, Labour continues to help prolong the conflict to secure British interests.
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.
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”.
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.”
Another sign of the British position came from Alicia Kearns, then a Conservative MP who later that year became chair of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. She said: “We’d rather arm the Ukrainians to the teeth than give Putin a success.”
Whether Johnson’s plea was the major reason for the talks falling apart is disputed, but fall apart they did.
Some commentators blame Moscow’s brutal attacks in March 2022 on Bucha, a town near Kyiv, during which Russian forces committed war crimes against civilians. Yet other evidence suggests Zelensky had decided to abandon negotiations before Bucha.
A month later, Johnson was urging French president Emmanuel Macron “against any negotiations with Russia“.
Peace feelers
The March/April 2022 negotiations may have produced the best opportunity to bring about a compromise peace, but there have been others since.
It is difficult to gauge whether the peace feelers put out by the Kremlin over the past two and half years are simply part of its propaganda strategy or serious attempts to end the fighting. The reason is that they have never been seriously tested by Washington and London.
Russia put out feelers for a ceasefire deal in the autumn of 2022, according to US officials. The New York Times reported those officials saying Putin was satisfied with Russia’s captured territory and was “ready for an armistice.”
But while some US military figures were encouraging Ukraine to negotiate, others were not, and Zelensky vowed to fight on.
Moscow also reportedly sent signals in support of a ceasefire to freeze the war in late 2023 and early 2024, Reuters revealed, referring to confidential talks taking place once again in Turkey. These were “rejected by the United States after contacts between intermediaries, three Russian sources with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters”.
In May this year, Reuters again reported that Moscow was “ready to halt the war in Ukraine with a negotiated ceasefire that recognises the current battlefield lines”, according to four Russian sources.
These feelers were reportedly dismissed by the US State Department. It told Reuters that any initiative for peace must respect Ukraine’s “territorial integrity, within its internationally recognised borders”.
Reuters noted that earlier in the year, in February 2024, three Russian sources told the news organisation that the US also rejected a previous suggestion by Putin of a ceasefire to freeze the war.
Matters have not been helped by Zelensky being locked into a war strategy, ruling out the possibility of a ceasefire, and going so far as to sign a decree in 2022 that formally declared any talks with Putin “impossible”.
Total war
The US and UK have long publicly rejected talks based on anything other than Russia’s complete withdrawal from Ukraine.
This principled position might have merit but for the real world intervening. Aggressors should surely not be rewarded in international relations, but this is something that applies as much to the US/UK in Iraq or Libya, or Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories, as to Russia in Ukraine.
Only in the case of Ukraine, however, has the UK held to the high-minded position that Moscow must withdraw all its forces before any peace moves can be considered.
The second obvious truth is that holding to the position of regaining full control over all Ukrainian territory – including the disputed areas in the Donbas and the Crimea – is simply a recipe for ongoing war.
As leading analyst Anatol Lieven has written, “To recover everything it has lost since 2014 looks impossible. It would require the total defeat of the Russian military.”
Yet this appears to be what Keir Starmer wants. “This terrible conflict must end with the defeat of Putin in Ukraine”, the then UK opposition leader said in the House of Commons in 2023.
Although Zelensky vows to fight on, some senior Ukrainian figures are more than aware of the need for pragmatism.
For example, General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence agency, said in May that his country was preparing for peace talks with Russia since there is “no way to win on the battlefield alone”.
The consequences of Russia’s continuing war have already been immense to Ukraine – hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, a crippled economy, massive foreign debt and hundreds of billions of pounds worth of reconstruction costs.
But in this, Britain sees opportunities.
What does Britain want?
To the UK establishment, the Ukraine war is a proxy one against Russia, its key rival for influence in Europe.
With Ukraine as the latest battleground in a modern great game, Whitehall’s main goal is to maintain Russia as a pariah state and end its independent foreign policy, which challenges Nato’s supremacy in Europe and, to an extent, the Middle East.
The war has enabled the UK to cement relations with an important new ally. UK officials have barely hidden their glee at overcoming their European competitors to get to Kyiv first.
“We were the first to train Ukrainian troops, the first in Europe to provide lethal weapons, the first to commit main battle tanks, the first to provide long-range missiles, and now we are the first to keep the promise made at last year’s NATO summit, alongside 30 other countries, to provide new bilateral security commitments”, the government said in January.
It added: “We are building a new partnership with Ukraine, designed to last 100 years or more. Yes, it is about defence and security, but it is also about trade, investment, culture and more.”
The UK has also been constantly keen to publicise the appalling scale of Russian casualties killed or wounded in Ukraine, which it claims is nearly half a million.
MI6 in Ukraine
It turns out that British intelligence was increasingly active in Ukraine for years before Russia’s invasion – a remarkable turnaround from the blackout of the Cold War years.
A bombshell New York Times investigation in February 2024 notes that the CIA established 12 secret “forward operating bases” along Ukraine’s border with Russia in the decade before 2022.
Ukraine’s security service head, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, reportedly first sought the assistance of the CIA and MI6 to rebuild the country’s intelligence agency on 24 February 2014. This was within days of the revolution that culminated in the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych and ushered in a pro-Western government.
Nalyvaichenko reportedly proposed a “three-way partnership” with the CIA and MI6. Ukrainian security officials then fed the CIA intelligence on Russia in order to coordinate activities against it and various training programmes were promoted for Ukrainian commandos and other elite units.
According to the New York Times, in the run-up to the 2022 invasion, the head of one of Russia’s intelligence services reported to Putin that CIA and MI6 were controlling Kyiv and were turning the neighbouring country “into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.”
In other words, “Ukraine was drawn into a Western coalition for the purpose of waging a broad-based shadow war against Russia”, comments Mark Episkopos, a fellow at the Quincy Institute.
He adds: “Moscow repeatedly warned — for many years before 2014 — that it was and remains prepared to take drastic action to prevent Ukraine from being used by the West as a forward operating base against Russia. Yet that, as recounted in lurid detail by the New York Times, is precisely what has happened over the past 10 years”.
This budding intelligence relationship has been cemented by the war itself. US Defense Department documents leaked in March 2023 showed Britain then had the largest number of special forces operating in the country, with 50 troops.
War profits
Courting Ukraine as a new ally has major benefits for the UK arms industry, which exerts enormous influence over Whitehall’s foreign policies. War is good for them, peace not so much.
In the ten years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, UK arms companies sold only £35m in military equipment to Kyiv. That figure has skyrocketed since February 2022 to over £800m.
UK arms corporations have secured a new, lucrative market.
Fuelled by the Ukraine war, BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms exporter, has seen a surge in sales over the past three years and has its highest ever order backlog.
The Labour government is now bending over backwards to further help the arms firms. In mid-July, two weeks after taking office, Keir Starmer hosted in London a meeting that brought together Zelensky himself with a range of UK arms corporations, including BAE, Thales UK, MBDA and Babcock.
A few weeks later, in early August, the UK signed a treaty with Ukraine to enable it to access £3.5bn of export finance to acquire military equipment from British companies.
Then Starmer announced the provision of £3bn a year of military support for Ukraine “until 2030/31 and for as long as needed”.
The war is a boon right across the UK’s substantial military industry: Britain has sent around 400 different military capabilities to Ukraine since 2022.
For US arms companies, the prize has been even greater. Washington has provided over $150bn worth of military equipment and aid to Ukraine since 2022.
Endgame
Journalist Branko Marcetic has long documented reports highlighting Western opposition to Ukraine peace prospects.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny the war in Ukraine could have been ended mere months into the Russian invasion — and that the US and UK governments worked to prevent this from happening”, he writes.
If a compromise peace holds little value for the British elite, what does “winning” mean? A war with Russia?
In May this year the UK and US publicly gave Ukraine the go-ahead to use British-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia, saying it was up to Kyiv whether to do so.
That decision appeared to cross a line. With senior British military figures saying the UK must be prepared to fight a war with Russia, who knows what endgame is being planned in Whitehall, or what Keir Starmer’s limits might be.
