Special Op Has No ‘Imperialist’ Goals - Analyst on Russia-Ukraine Peace Treaty Draft

The draft of the 2022 Moscow-Kiev peace accord indicates, in particular, that the status of Crimea was “not even” on the table, Russian political scientist Dmitry Evstafiev told Sputnik.

The terms of the 2022 peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine, almost agreed in April, have been published by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The publication confirms the main goal of Russia's special military operation is the demilitarisation of Ukraine, not the seizure of new territories, Dmitry Evstafiev, a Moscow-based political scientist and professor at HSE University, told Sputnik.

He recalled that the purpose of demilitarisation is to prevent the Kiev regime from creating "a direct and explicit threat against the Russian Federation".

Evstafiev said the WSJ's publication also "removed all questions and denied all misinformation that the Russian delegation had allegedly agreed to discuss the status of Crimea during the 2022 peace talks with Kiev".

Overall, the document disproves the West’s allegations about Russia’s "imperialist ambitions" regarding the special operation, the analyst noted, recalling that "it was the West who forced Kiev to finally abandon the peace deal for good, fundamentally changing the nature of the conflict over Ukraine."

"Now it turns out that they were offended, but it was the choice of the West which pursued an absolutely imperialistic - or I should say - colonial policy towards Russia, refusing any dialog with Moscow," Evstafiev concluded.

Russian and Ukrainian delegations participated in several rounds of peace negotiations, including in Turkiye, in the spring of 2022. In October 2022, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, signed a decree stating that Kiev would not be able to hold peace talks as long as President Vladimir Putin was in power in Russia.

In November 2023, Ukraine’s former chief negotiator with Russia, David Arakhamia, said that then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had talked Kiev out of signing an agreement with Moscow to end the conflict, something BoJo has denied.