WarrenPeace — 3 years ago(October 04, 2022 03:13 PM)

War in Ukraine rages on, with no end in sight — peace talks are essential
The U.S. and Britain sabotaged peace talks in favor of grinding, endless war. Ukraine's people are paying the price
By MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 7, 2022 5:45AM (EDT)
For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a 15-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. Details were not fully worked out, but the framework and the political will appeared to be there.
Russia was prepared to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality between Russia and NATO.
The agreed framework provided for political transitions in Crimea and Donbas that both sides would accept and recognize, based on self-determination for the people of those regions. The future security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed by a group of other countries, but Ukraine would not host foreign military bases on its territory.
On March 27, President Zelenskyy told a national TV audience, "Our goal is obvious — peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible." He laid out his "red lines" for the negotiations in that televised speech to reassure his people he would not concede too much, and he promised them a referendum on the neutrality agreement before it would take effect.
Such early success for a peace initiative was no surprise to conflict resolution specialists. The best chance for a negotiated peace settlement is generally during the first months of a war. Each month a war rages on offers reduced chances for peace, as each side highlights the atrocities of the other, hostility becomes entrenched and positions harden.
The abandonment of that early peace initiative stands as one of the great tragedies of this conflict, and the full scale of that tragedy will only become clear over time as the war rages on and its dreadful consequences accumulate.
Ukrainian and Turkish sources have revealed that the U.K. and U.S. governments played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects for peace. During then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's "surprise visit" to Kyiv on April 9, he reportedly told Zelenskyy that the U.K. was "in it for the long run," that it would not be party to any agreement between Russia and Ukraine, and that the "collective West" saw a chance to "press" Russia and was determined to make the most of it.
The same message was reiterated by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who followed Johnson to Kyiv on April 25 and made it clear that the U.S. and NATO were no longer just trying to help Ukraine defend itself but were now committed to using the war to "weaken" Russia. Turkish diplomats told retired British diplomat Craig Murray that these messages from the U.S. and Britain killed their otherwise promising efforts to mediate a ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution.
U.S. leaders have inflated the danger that Russia poses to its neighbors and the West, deliberately treating it as an enemy with whom diplomacy or cooperation would be futile, rather than as a neighbor raising defensive concerns over NATO expansion and its gradual encirclement by U.S. and allied military forces.
Far from aiming to deter Russia from dangerous or destabilizing actions, successive administrations of both U.S. political parties have sought every means available to "overextend and unbalance" Russia, all the while misleading the American public into supporting an ever-escalating and unthinkably dangerous conflict between our two countries, which together possess more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons.
After six months of a U.S. and NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, we are at a crossroads. Further escalation should be unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare that slowly and agonizingly destroys Ukraine, killing hundreds of Ukrainians with each day that passes.
The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end, find reasonable political solutions to Ukraine's political divisions, and seek a peaceful framework for the underlying geopolitical competition between the U.S., Russia and China.
https://www.salon.com/2022/09/07/in-ukraine-rages-on-with-no-end-in-sight--peace-talks-are-essential/
By MEDEA BENJAMIN
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace and author of several books, including "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran." She and Nicolas J.S. Davies are the authors of "War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict," coming this fall from OR Books.
By NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES
Nicolas J.S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the au