What if Putin Hadn’t Unilaterally Withdrawn Russian Troops From Northern Ukraine in April 2022?

Zelensky would have signed the Istanbul Agreement, Russian troops would have been withdrawn from all Ukraine's prewar territory and NATO and Russia would not be on the verge of nuclear war.

French President Emanuel Macron meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 to encourage both sides to implement the Minsk II Accords in accordance with Zelensky’s campaign pledge. This could have been the scene had Zelensky met with Putin to sign the peace agreement in Istanbul that the two sides had spent weeks negotiating in March 2022.

As I have written previously, the war in Ukraine is in the immortal words of General of the Army Omar Bradley, "The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." The war in Ukraine has proven to be a Biden manufactured war, deliberately provoked by his failure to issue Russia a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO. I have pointed out how easily the outbreak of the war could have been avoided had the Biden administration wanted it to be. It is a war being fought against a manufactured enemy—the Russian Federation—a country that is only America’s enemy because of our aggressive and expansionist policies against it without which it could have been our strategic partner or even our ally against Communist China. It is also a war that to date has only had one winner—the People’s Republic of China—which has emerged stronger and more powerful and more certain than ever that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan resulting in its capitulation would not elicit a direct US military response. In this article, I will again address how the world might have ended up if the administration had not snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by vetoing the Istanbul Agreement and opting to prolong this unnecessary and unwinnable war for Ukraine indefinitely to the last Ukrainian.

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a new peace offer including an immediate cease-fire and negotiations for a permanent peace agreement if Ukraine begins withdrawing all its troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts and commits to returning to being a permanently neutral state outside of NATO. He also stated that the provisions of the Istanbul agreement regarding the reduction in this size of Ukraine’s active-duty army, Ukrainian non-nuclear status and a limitation on the number and range of its postwar weapon systems should be included in any final peace agreement ending the conflict. Since the day after the war began, Russia has been calling for peace negotiations without preconditions but with this announcement that is no longer the case. Back in April 2022, I warned that if Zelensky did not resume peace talks with Russia soon, Russia would annex three to four Russian occupied Ukrainian oblasts including all the Ukrainian regions that Putin referenced above. Five months later that is exactly what Putin did. I have been warning ever since that the longer Ukraine and its Western benefactors waited to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia, the worse the final peace terms would become for Ukraine and that is exactly what we are seeing today.

ABC News reported that Putin has placed the blame for all the deaths that have resulted since his March 2022 Istanbul peace offer on Ukraine and NATO and said they would be solely to blame for any Ukrainian deaths that occurred from this point on if they rejected his new peace offer. Putin revealed that he never planned to capture Kyiv but only to partially surround it to induce Zelensky to sign a peace agreement ending Ukraine’s de facto NATO membership and give up its plans to stage a new Ukrainian military offensive to regain full control of the Donbass region—one-third of which had declared independence in 2014 and aligned with Russia.

Putin said if “Kyiv and Western capitals” reject his offer, “it is their business, their political and moral responsibility for continuing the bloodshed.” The Kremlin has repeatedly aired its readiness for peace talks with Kyiv and blamed the West for undermining its efforts to end the conflict. Putin went further Friday and claimed his troops never intended to storm Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, even though they approached the city. “In essence, it was nothing other than an operation to force the Ukrainian regime to peace. The troops were there to push the Ukrainian side to negotiate, to try and find an acceptable solution,” he said.

The South China Morning Post reported on Putin’s offer:

“The conditions are very simple,” Putin said, listing the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the entire territory of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in eastern and southern Ukraine among his demands. “As soon as Kyiv says it is ready to do this and begins really withdrawing troops and officially renounces plans to join Nato, we will immediately, literally that very minute, cease fire and begin talks,” Putin said. “I repeat, we will do this immediately. Naturally, we will simultaneously guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal of Ukrainian units and formations.” The Russian leader also warned the stand-off between Moscow and the West was coming “unacceptably close to the point of no return” and boasted that Moscow “possesses the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Putin has repeatedly invoked nuclear rhetoric throughout the conflict with Ukraine, which he casts as just one front in a wider “hybrid war” between Russia and the NATO military alliance.

Map showing Russia’s annexation of most of four former Ukrainian oblasts in September 2022. For the first time since the war began, Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding Ukraine cede the remainder of these oblasts as a pre-condition to begin peace negotiations to end the war.

Putin warned that if Ukraine and the West refuse Russia’s peace terms, then his peace offer will get worse for Ukraine and Russia will begin taking large swaths of Ukrainian territory by force. This was the first time since September 2022 that Putin has dropped his previous offer of a Korean-style armistice along the current line of control. This strikes me as likely being Russia’s last offer before a massive Russian offensive in the Kharkiv, Sumy and possibly even Chernihiv regions that could very well succeed in causing Ukraine’s frontline to collapse and enabling Russian forces to overrun eastern Ukraine all the way to the Dnipro River. Ignoring Putin’s warnings, President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin immediately rejected Putin’s peace offer.  If Putin finally authorizes a massive Russian offensive to take control of Ukraine’s three northeastern oblasts that begins to break Ukraine’s frontlines threatening its military collapse, they may want to re-consider as then Ukraine could potentially trade full control of Putin’s requested territories in exchange for a full Russian withdrawal from northeast Ukraine before Putin’s peace terms worsen again for Ukraine.  

While Biden is going all out to try to get a cease-fire in Gaza to stop the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, he continues to adamantly refuse to discuss a cease-fire or even discuss a peaceful diplomatic solution at all to stop the killing of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The question we should be asking is why does Biden care more about Gazans than Ukrainians? Meanwhile, Zelensky, who banned any peace discussions with Russia back in September 2022, is chairing a so-called peace conference in Switzerland this weekend to which the Russian delegation was not invited to participate. Zelensky’s peace terms include the return of all Ukraine’s 1991 territory, huge reparations against Russia and Nuremburg style war crimes tribunals in which Putin would be extradited and either imprisoned or executed even though there is no evidence that Russia’s President has ever ordered any war crimes against Ukrainian civilians.

The peace terms he is proposing essentially amount to a modern-day version of the Treaty of Versailles even though it is Russia, not Ukraine that is winning the war! This is the equivalent of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler calling a peace conference of Germany’s allies in January 1945 after Germany lost the Battle of the Bulge and its territory was in the process of being overrun by the US, UK and the USSR. In fact, the most recent report issued by the UN Human Rights Commission was able to confirm only 10,582 civilians have been killed as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine between February 24, 2022, and February 15, 2024. Assuming the daily death rate of 14-15 civilians a day remains steady that would equate to about 12,300 today. By comparison, the US and UK killed an average of 2,058 German and Japanese civilians through starvation blockades and terror bombings from December 7, 1941 to August 15, 1945, a daily death rate 140 times higher than Russia has killed Ukrainian civilians since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Tragically for Ukrainians and the world, a negotiated peace agreement ending the war in Ukraine has never seemed more unattainable than it does today as only one side—Russia—has been willing to negotiate a peaceful end to the war from early April 2022 to the present. However, that was not the case just after the war began when a peace agreement securing a full Russian withdrawal to its pre-war positions was on the verge of being finalized. In an interview with the UK Telegraph, March 2022 at a time when Russian troops had partially surrounded the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky called for an immediate cease fire and a meeting with Putin to sign a negotiated compromise peace agreement saying several nations had expressed a willingness to provide NATO-style security guarantees to Ukraine without offering formal membership if Russian troops were withdrawn from Ukraine as part of a peace agreement. In a different interview that same month with the Hindustan Times, Zelensky told Russian media he understood that it was impossible for Ukraine to liberate all its territory and was willing to meet Putin anywhere to obtain a permanent cease fire and sign a peace agreement ending the war. Six months later, he banned Ukrainian government officials from even discussing peace with Russia so long as Russian President Vladimir Putin remains in power. So what changed?

The Istanbul Agreement-Ukraine’s Missed Chance to Win the War

On March 31, 2022, Ukrainian negotiators were popping champagne bottles having succeeded in negotiating a favorable peace deal ending the war with Russia only five weeks after it had begun, following weeks of negotiations with Russia in Istanbul according to Davyd Arakhamia, who served as the leader of the Ukrainian delegation while also serving as chairman of Ukraine’s ruling “Servant of the People” party. A two-page summary of the Istanbul Agreement which was drafted by Ukraine and signed by the Russian delegation was released by the New York Times earlier today along with two other draft peace agreements. The agreed-upon terms amounted to a stunning victory for Ukraine by all accounts. After nearly capturing the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv at the onset of the war, Russia had agreed to withdraw its troops from all prewar Ukrainian-controlled territory in exchange for perpetual Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO to include modifying the Ukrainian constitution back to its original neutral mandate, removing all NATO troops and CIA bases from Ukraine and Ukrainian agreement to perpetual non-nuclear status. The agreement also included Ukrainian recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics along their prewar borders, a modest reduction in the size and armaments of the Ukrainian armed forces and a ban on far-right ultra-nationalist parties from serving in the government. Russia agreed to let Ukraine remain independent and for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to remain in power with Ukraine being able to join the European Union and receiving security guarantees from the Western powers against potential future Russian aggression.

Today, the New York Times article released three draft copies of Russo-Ukrainian peace agreements from March-April 2022. Biden and Zelensky have blocked all attempts to negotiate a peaceful diplomatic solution to end the war since despite the fact that Ukraine has no chance to win the war or to retake any of its lost territories by military action.

The terms of this peace deal have been verified by Ukraine war enthusiast, Fiona Hill, in her Foreign Affairs article, entitled “The World Putin Wants” published in August 2022. According to Hill, Russia agreed to withdraw its troops to its pre-war borders in exchange for Ukraine agreeing to remain neutral outside of NATO, terms which have since been confirmed by multiple sources. Russia’s peace terms to end the war prove conclusively that Putin did not invade Ukraine to acquire new territory but rather to return Ukraine to its pre-February 2014 Maidan coup neutral status it enjoyed from 1991-2014 during which Ukraine was whole and free as well as to defend the Russian backed separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics from a planned Ukraine military offensive. The very existence of this draft peace agreement proves that Western claims that Putin seeks nothing less but the destruction or annexation of most or all of Ukraine or else minimally the transformation of Ukraine into a Russian satellite state and that Ukraine is therefore fighting a war for its very existence as an independent nation have no basis in reality.

Under the agreement, Ukraine committed to drop all economic sanctions against Russia and urge its Western benefactors to do the same. US leaders were reportedly most concerned about the limits on the number of tanks, artillery systems, warships and combat aircraft Ukraine could retain postwar concluding they amounted to “unilateral disarmament.” Russia proposal to reduce the size of the Ukrainian army to 100,000 troops including Ukraine’s National Guard happens to be the exact number which I listed in my revised July 6, 2022 fifteen-point peace plan as I correctly concluded that to be the maximum number of Ukrainian troops that would be acceptable to Russia. I arrived at this exact number upon hearing that Russia was calling for the demilitarization of Ukraine which reminded me of the Treaty of Versailles in which the western allies limited the size of the German Army to 100,000 troops for a nation which had nearly twice as many people as Ukraine did in 2022.

However, unlike the Treaty of Versailles, Russia did not attempt to limit the number of Ukrainian reserve troops (or ban Ukraine from having tanks, heavy artillery or combat aircraft) so presumably Ukraine could have trained a force of 900,000 army reserves (giving it a million man army in wartime) and in the event of future Russian aggression could have counted on the US, UK, France, Germany and Poland to have sent them large quantities of arms to help it defend itself based on the security guarantees provided for under the Istanbul agreement. At the time of the agreement, the two sides had not yet reached agreement on the total number of troops or weapon systems, but Zelensky told the lead negotiator of the Ukrainian delegation, he could finalize them during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin planned for April 9^th in Istanbul.

It was believed at the time that France and Germany, which had mediated the Minsk Accords which if they had been implemented by Ukraine would have restored full control of the Donbass region to Ukraine and averted Russia’s invasion entirely, would urge Ukraine to sign the agreement. This may help explain why the Biden administration dispatched UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to torpedo it on April 8the before they could do so. Russia endorsed Ukraine’s proposal for Western security guarantees of Ukraine’s neutrality along the lines of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 with Ukraine mentioning the US, UK, Russia, China, France, Germany, Turkey, Canada, Poland, Italy and Israel as potential guarantor states. Under the agreement, Ukraine pledged to recognize continued Russian control over the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics along their prewar boundaries while the question of Crimea was to be resolved through peaceful negotiation within the next fifteen years.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the head of Ukraine’s “Servant of the People” ruling party, Davyd Arakamia, both confirmed Putin’s assertion last year that the draft agreement was partially signed and ninety percent finalized according to multiple reports and it only remained to arrange a few details before Putin and Zelensky met to sign the agreement ending the war in Ukraine only weeks after it began. Arakamia, who served as the lead Ukrainian government negotiator said that the Ukrainian delegation concluded that the terms of the agreement were a victory for Ukraine and represented the best terms possible and that the only thing that remained before Putin and Zelensky met to sign it was to finish negotiating limits on how many tanks, aircraft, and rocket launchers Ukraine would be permitted to retain after the war ended.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on February 6th

As confirmed in his interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin, satisfied that the objectives of Russia’s so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ had been largely achieved, agreed to the request of European leaders to prove his sincere support for peace by implementing the terms of the agreement by beginning a pre-announced, unilaterally Russian military withdrawal from nearly half of Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine the day after the draft agreement had been signed. This ended the threat that Russia would attempt to conquer Kyiv, overthrow Zelensky and install a puppet government in Ukraine in what seemed to be a stunning victory for NATO and its Ukrainian proxy. We now know that Russia withdrew its troops from northern Ukraine too early as their unilateral military withdrawal removed the biggest incentive for Ukraine to honor its peace agreement with Russia.

As Putin stated, the objective of Russia’s Special Military Operation was not to capture Kyiv per se or even to annex any Ukrainian territory outside of the separatist republics which controlled only one-third of the Donbass region, but rather to partially surround Kyiv to force Ukraine to revert to its pre-Feb 2014 CIA-backed coup neutral buffer state status expelling all NATO troops and bases and ending its security relationship with NATO. Zelensky committed to doing that in a draft peace agreement that Ukraine had written, as a counteroffer to Russia’s 15-point peace plan, that was signed by Russia as written without any revisions on March 31, 2022 in Istanbul. However, both Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to provide Zelensky with the security assurances he said he needed in order to finalize the agreement, so he ended up repudiating it.

Much has been made of the 40-mile-long convoy of tanks and armored vehicles that Putin ordered halted on the road to Kyiv for an entire month beginning on March 1st. Western experts claimed they must have run out of fuel or broken down and pointed to this as a sign of impotency for the Russian army despite the fact that no such problems were visible anywhere else along the front. However, when Putin ordered them withdrawn following the signing of the interim peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine on March 31^st, they withdrew very quickly proving that they were neither out of fuel nor broken down but that the reason they had halted was a political decision from the Kremlin. While it is true that Putin did attempt to encircle and capture Kyiv in the first week of the war in a bid to forcibly replace Zelensky with pro-Russian leader, former Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Yuriy Boyko, once that failed, he used Russian troops in Kyiv and the rest of northern Ukraine to effectively coerce Ukraine to agree to sign a peace agreement that was acceptable to Russia.

This powerful Russian armored convoy was a dagger pointed at Kyiv aimed at inducing Ukraine to agree to accept all of Russia’s limited objectives. Once Putin believed that was about to be achieved, he ordered Russian troops withdrawn from all northern Ukraine, which he had never wanted to permanently occupy in the first place. The bottom line is that if Putin had wanted to capture Kyiv or occupy all of Ukraine, he could have done so had he invaded with an army of half a million troops at the onset of the war. An existential war of conquest this was not. In his interview with Tucker Carlson on February 6^th, Putin stated he ordered the withdrawal of Russian forces from northern Ukraine at the suggestion of NATO leaders to prove he was sincere about fully implementing his interim peace agreement with Ukraine.

Biden administration officials, led by Director of Strategic Communications Rear Admiral John Kirby (USN-Ret), have repeatedly claimed that “the war could end tomorrow if Russia withdrew all of its troops from Ukraine.” However, as noted above, Russia offered to do exactly that under the terms of the Istanbul Agreement which the Russian delegation initialed on March 31, 2022. On the same day the agreement was signed, Russia announced that it would unilaterally withdraw all its troops from the three northern Ukrainian oblasts of Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kyiv in furtherance of the terms of the agreement. On April 1^st, Putin began withdrawing Russian troops from northern Ukraine with the withdrawal from over one-third of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory having been fully completed by April 8^th.

On April 1^st, Russian troops were withdrawn from the city of Bucha located northwest of Kyiv and Ukrainian forces discovered dozens of dead bodies belonging to civilians believed to have been killed by Russian forces. A UN Human Rights Council investigation was able to confirm 73 civilians were likely killed by Russian forces in Bucha. However, they have never confirmed the Ukrainian claim that Russia killed 458 civilians in Bucha. Certainly, if it is true that Russian troops killed 73 un-armed civilian non-combatants that would constitute a war crime, but it is difficult to argue that the discovery of such a small-scale Russian war crime constituted a sufficient justification for Zelensky to abandon a victorious peace deal which would have ended a war that has cost nearly 300,000 Ukrainian lives since and that could have liberated all of pre-war Ukrainian territory with no end in sight.

Map showing Russian occupation of northern Ukraine on March 22, 2022, including their partial envelopment of Kyiv prior to Russia’s unilateral military withdrawal, which proved conclusively that Putin had no territorial designs on central or northern Ukraine and was committed to withdrawing Russian forces from Ukraine if Zelensky had signed the peace agreement in April 2022.

On April 2^nd, the day after Ukraine had found evidence of the massacre of dozens of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces in the city of Bucha, David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation in charge of negotiating the peace agreement with Russia, stated that Zelensky had decided to cancel his summit with Russian President Vladmir Putin which was scheduled for April 9^th, 2022 to finalize the agreement on the size of the post-war Ukrainian army and the number and type of weapons it could possess, using the Bucha massacre as a pretext. The day before the summit meeting had been scheduled to take place and the day the Russian withdrawal from northern Ukraine was completed, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv and informed Zelensky in no uncertain terms that the US and UK would not support Ukraine and refuse to provide Ukraine with any security guarantees if it chose to make what amounted to be a separate peace with Russia to end NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. Since Zelensky had expressly stated that any peace agreement with Russia needed to be conditioned on security guarantees from the West, that effectively derailed the peace deal.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett confirmed that Johnson blocked the peace deal even though he had successfully mediated it with US, French and German support. Johnson informed Zelensky that if he abandoned all peace negotiations with Russia including Moscow’s demand of Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO, both the UK and the US would essentially offer Ukraine a blank check of indefinite military and financial support to retake not just the five remaining Russian occupied Ukrainian oblasts of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia but Russia’s long-since annexed region of Crimea as well. Johnson informed Zelensky he had the full support of the Biden administration in making these declarations, which was subsequently confirmed. The fact that Biden and Boris Johnson vetoed the finalization of the Russo-Ukrainian peace agreement and the withdrawal of Russian military forces to their prewar positions means that the Biden administration and British governments are indirectly responsible for every Ukrainian life that has been lost since early April 2022.

Ultimately, it appears that it was Zelensky who decided to cancel the peace agreement after Russian troops began withdrawing from all northern Ukraine thus largely eliminating the threat to Kyiv and himself and making him feel safe to continue the war in perpetuity with a blank check of Western military and financial support, using the Bucha massacre as a pretext. Therefore, Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv may have merely served to confirm Zelensky’s decision to suspend peace talks with Russia and to do so indefinitely. There have been rumors that the Bucha massacre, in which 458 bodies were reportedly discovered, was staged but in any event, it would not have been discovered or manufactured by Ukraine on April 1^st had Putin not elected to withdraw Russian troops from all northern Ukraine that day. At the time I strongly suspected Bucha was, in fact, a Ukrainian false flag operation coming as it did the day after the Istanbul agreement had been announced. However, the subsequent UN investigation suggests it was real but greatly exaggerated by Zelensky likely for the purpose of torpedoing the peace deal once Russia withdrew all its troops from the vicinity of the capital.

According to LTG Keith Kellogg (USA Ret.), President Biden was supporting peace negotiations during the first few weeks of the war behind the scenes in the belief that Russian victory over Ukraine was imminent. As I wrote in my previous article “How Biden Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory and Decided to Prolong the War in Ukraine Indefinitely,” implementation of the Istanbul Agreement would have constituted a great victory for Ukraine, as initially Western leaders believed Kyiv would fall to the Russians within three days and Ukraine would be forced to capitulate within three weeks of the invasion. Unfortunately, western leaders took the unilateral Russian withdrawal from three Ukrainian oblasts including Kyiv, which Putin had meant to prove Russia wanted peace, as a sign of weakness, causing Zelensky to repudiate the Istanbul agreement which he had helped draft and causing Biden to dispatch Boris Johnson to Kyiv to demand that Zelensky not make a separate peace with Russia and step up military support for Ukraine.  

After Putin ordered all Russian troops to be withdrawn from three northern Ukrainian oblasts including Kyiv, the Biden administration began falsely claiming that it was the Ukrainian armed forces that had miraculously chased the mighty Russian army from over one-third of its territory inside of a week even though the Russian military withdrawal was not the result of any Ukrainian military offensive as the Ukrainian army was too weak to mount a major counteroffensive until September. Biden officials subsequently proclaimed that Ukraine could defeat Russia, despite the fact Russia was 35 times larger than Ukraine with over five times more people and many times more tanks, artillery systems and aircraft (not to mention 8,000-16,000 more nuclear weapons) and expel Russian troops from all its territory as Russia had proved to be much weaker militarily than Western military leaders had expected them to be.

In so doing, they ignored the lessons of history given the fact that both Napoleon and Hitler also thought they could defeat Russia given they possessed the best armies in Europe at the time, only to find their hubris led to the total defeat of their nations in war. Will the Western powers be forced to repeat this same lesson with catastrophic, and potentially existential consequences, to the US and its NATO allies?

A recent report estimates Russia now has four times more operational strategic nuclear weapons than the US has increasing Putin’s belief that Russia could successfully fight and win a nuclear war against NATO.

President Biden boasted that Putin’s plan to annex all of Ukraine had failed, knowing that the reason Russia invaded Ukraine had nothing to do with any territorial dispute or effort on the part of Putin to annex more territory, but rather represented a last-ditch attempt to roll back NATO expansion along Russia’s western frontier after fifteen years of attempting a peaceful diplomatic solution had failed. The purpose of these deliberate mischaracterizations of Russia’s limited military objectives have been to feed to misperception that Russia is “losing” because they have fallen so short of Western-claimed military objectives when in fact Russia called for a permanent cease-fire and announced that nearly all of its military objectives had been achieved by September 2022 and the rest could be achieved by diplomatic negotiation despite the fact it controlled less than one-fifth of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory down from nearly one-third before Russia’s unilateral military withdrawal nearly six months earlier.

For weeks, both Zelensky and the Biden administration had been stating that the ultimate goal of the war was for Russia to withdraw its troops to their pre-war positions. Yet, by late April, the Biden administration’s goal shifted to an unachievable objective—namely the liberation of all Russian annexed territory including Crimea. Retired generals on Fox News had already managed a dizzying 180-degree pivot shifting from saying Russian victory was inevitable to saying Ukraine could hold out against Russia if the US stepped up its arms shipments scarcely a month later.

As I noted in my previous article entitled, the costs and consequences of Zelensky’s decision to reject the Istanbul Agreement have been galling for Ukraine. While Western leaders and regime media have been incessant in their claims that Ukraine is winning the war and only needs one more infusion of weapon systems to defeat Russia and liberate all its lost territories including Crimea, a closer examination of the facts exposes this Western war propaganda narrative as false.

The Costs and Consequences of the Ukraine Rejecting the Peace Agreement

Since Biden provoked Russia to invade Ukraine by refusing Putin’s December 7th, 2021 guarantee that Russian troops would not invade in exchange for a written pledge from the US that Ukraine would never join NATO, Ukraine, which was already the poorest country in Europe before the war started on a per capita basis, has suffered economic devastation not seen in Europe since the Second World War. It has lost nearly thirty percent of its Gross Domestic Product with half of its critical infrastructure destroyed and half of its businesses being forced to shut down. The World Economic Forum estimates the current cost of reconstruction would total $1 trillion which is a staggering figure considering that  would take Ukraine nearly thirty years to pay off even if spent its entire pre-war (2021) government budget to pay for those costs but reconstruction cannot begin until a peaceful settlement ending the war has been finalized.  The WEF also reported that, “Approximately 20% of the country’s farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance.” Ukraine’s unemployment rate is currently just above 18%.

The war in Ukraine has also resulted in other momentous changes as it has gone from the second largest country in Europe by territory to the fourth largest with the loss of eighteen percent of its territory to Russian annexation and from the fifth most populous to the sixth with the loss of over thirty-four percent of its population over the past decade from over forty-five million to approximately thirty million over the past decade. By way of comparison, Stalin killed 15-25 percent of Ukraine’s population during the Holodomor in the 1930s and after the USSR reconquered Ukraine near the end of World War Two. Reuters has reported that due in large part to the exodus of Ukrainian refugees into Eastern Europe, the population of Ukraine may have decreased to as low as 28 million. Either way, this represents a staggering proportion of their citizens that greatly exceeds the proportional losses in population by Poland, the USSR, or China during WW2. Only German postwar population losses even come close given Germany lost 34 percent of its territory and at least one-quarter of its population in two world wars.

Of the population reduction which has taken place since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, 57 percent have been due to refugees fleeing the country out of ten million refugees overall over the past two years of war or 24 percent of Ukraine’s prewar population. Another 41 percent of the reduction has been due to Russian annexations of the former Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. Two percent of these reductions are due to Ukrainian war deaths which constitutes over 0.6 percent of Ukraine’s prewar population.  Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product has plummeted by nearly 25 percent since the Biden authorized Euromaidan coup of February 2014 while Russia’s economy has expanded by 42 percent during the same period.

While the Biden administration has used the war to unify and expand a divided NATO to include Finland and Sweden, Putin has been using the war to disarm the US and its NATO allies of huge quantities of its most advanced weapons systems which Russia has successfully destroyed in Ukraine. Russia has been since grinding up Ukraine’s army resulting in the loss of over 700,000 Ukrainian troops of which as many as 300,000 have been killed in action forcing even many US leaders to admit that Russia is getting close to winning the war.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven conclusively that NATO membership would not only be worthless for Ukraine since per Zelensky’s own admission, he thinks the US has responded exactly to Russian aggression as it would have if Ukraine had been an actual NATO member, but that it would be highly provocative and threatening to Russia and that it would actually invite further Russian aggression. Given the fact that the Biden administration has refused to send troops to defend Ukraine militarily, why should Ukraine believe that the US would defend it if it were a formal NATO member state? Ukraine needs to stop seeking security from the West which lacks that ability to provide it and realize it can only obtain actual security from ending its hostility to Russia and embracing neutrality as it did from 1991-2014 during which Ukraine remained whole, independent and free. Ukraine’s security against Russia and its territorial integrity was always dependent, not upon NATO membership, but rather upon friendly relations with Moscow, most importantly its continued commitment to remaining a neutral buffer state between Russia and the NATO alliance.

Ukraine Would Have Been Much Better Off if Zelensky Had Signed the Istanbul Agreement

But what if Putin had retained control of all three northern Ukrainian regions and left Kyiv partially surrounded to pressure Zelensky to follow through with his initial plan to sign the Istanbul peace agreement on April 9, 2022? If Putin hadn’t jumped the gun in unilaterally withdrawing all Russian troops from northern Ukraine including Kyiv, Zelensky likely would have signed the Istanbul agreement, and the US would have declared victory in forcing Russian troops to return to their pre-war borders even while Russia triumphed in rolling back NATO from Ukraine. Ultimately, Putin’s withdrawal proved to be a profoundly tragic mistake not only for Russia but for Ukraine and the world as had Russian troops continued to partially surround Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, ensuring the Russian atrocities at Bucha remained undiscovered, Zelensky likely would have felt pressured to go through with his planned summit with Putin on April 9th signing a peace treaty ending the war days later, saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.

Disgraced former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson making a surprise visit to Kyiv on April 8, 2022 ordering Zelensky not to meet with Putin to sign the Istanbul Peace Agreement ending the war with Russia and allowing the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territory.

It is likely President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson would have been far less adamant in opposing the peace agreement under these circumstances and that Zelensky would have signed the agreement even if the US and UK had refused to provide security guarantees for Ukrainian neutrality. Earlier this week, the Biden administration signed a ten year security agreement with Ukraine so there is no longer any impediment for Ukraine to proceed with a peace agreement with Russia on that front. This security pact commits the US to continue to provide massive quantities of arms to Ukraine over the next decade but does not commit the US to send any troops to fight Russia directly.

If Zelensky had signed the Istanbul agreement on April 9, 2022, Ukraine would have had its independence and sovereignty restored as an independent and permanently neutral state outside of NATO. Russia would never have any reason to attack it again as its legitimate security interests would have been satisfied. Ukraine would have had NATO-style security guarantees from multiple Western countries including France, Germany, Turkey, Poland, Italy and Israel and very possibly the US and UK so if Russia were to violate the peace agreement, the US and NATO could re-impose sanctions and resume sending lethal military aid to Ukraine.  Zelensky would have been forced to hold a democratic election in March 2024 but unlike the case today, he likely would have retained his popular support and would have been democratically re-elected. During his April 14^th address, Putin appeared to express interest in restoring “Good Neighborliness” with Ukraine, likely in reference to Russia’s 1997 Treaty of Friendship with Ukraine. Accordingly, it is very possible if not likely that he would have proposed a renewal of this treaty with Ukraine after the war had ended with a re-establishment of robust, mutually beneficial trade ties.

While Ukraine stands to gain the most from a peace agreement ending the war, every nation involved in the conflict could legitimately claim victory. President Biden claim he helped prevent a Russian takeover of Ukraine, prevented an escalation of the war to NATO and facilitated a full Russian military withdrawal from all of Ukraine’s prewar controlled territory after a mere six weeks following the Russian invasion, thus restoring peace and stability to Europe and normalizing relations with Russia. The Russian threat to the US and NATO both in terms of conventional and nuclear attack would have faded though Finland and Sweden may not have ended up joining NATO following the full Russian military withdrawal from pre-war controlled Ukrainian territory.

Meanwhile, Western leaders could claim victory by stating their military assistance to Ukraine helped them force Russia to declare an end to the war. Zelensky could have claimed that Russian troops were withdrawn from all eight Ukrainian oblasts to their prewar borders leaving Ukraine in control of 93 percent of its internationally recognized territory. He could have drawn attention to the fact that he was able to minimize the casualties to Ukraine to approximately 11,000 Ukrainian troops (instead of 300,000 today) and 1,500 civilians killed while enabling all the 4.7 million refugees to return home restoring Ukraine’s population to its prewar level of 40 million (rather than only 26-28 million today). Since the damage to Ukraine’s economy would have been minimized and Western nations would have been willing to foot the bill for reconstruction which totaled $80-100 billion, Ukraine would have been almost entirely reconstructed by now with its businesses fully functioning and its unemployment rate restored to its prewar levels. Under the Istanbul agreement, Ukraine would have been allowed to join the European Union so it is possible it might have formally joined the EU by 2024. Ukraine’s future would be bright, as it enjoyed peace and economic prosperity, instead of being dark and uncertain as it is today on the verge of military collapse that could enable Russian troops to overrun nearly half of the country and perhaps even enable them to partially surround Kyiv again.

Putin could boast that Russia had achieved all the objectives of the Special Military Operation in terms of demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine while forcing Ukraine to expel all NATO troops and intelligence agents and cut all ties with the NATO military alliance thus eliminating the existential threat to Russia of having Ukraine as a de facto NATO member state. He also could draw attention to Russia’s annexation of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics which constituted three percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. Putin could have pointed to the restoration of Russian as one of Ukraine’s official languages and protections for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church ending Kyiv’s attempts to persecute its Russian minority population. He likely would have been successful in getting the West to drop most of its economic sanctions on Russia.

A peace agreement would end the fighting and allow over ten million Ukrainian refugees to return home and begin the process of reconstruction and recovery. Economically speaking, the benefits of Ukraine negotiating such an agreement sparing its cities from further destruction and allowing for the reconstruction of thousands of its roads, bridges, schools and hospitals, would be profound. The war has forced half of Ukraine’s businesses to close while a peace deal could allow them to re-open, allowing millions of its unemployed citizens to return to work while ending Russia’s devastating Black Sea naval blockade, restoring its ability to engage in international trade via the Black Sea. Furthermore, ending the war would enable Ukraine to immediately begin the process of rebuilding its shattered economy in which it lost over thirty percent of its GDP during the first year of the war alone. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ending the war in April 2022, could have saved the eastern half of Ukraine from potentially being overrun in what may be a massive Russian military offensive that could materialize this summer threatening the loss of hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian lives in Biden’s manufactured and unwinnable proxy war against Russia, along with Ukraine’s very independence.

Chinese President Xi Jinping—to date the one true victor of Biden’s manufactured proxy war against Russia in Ukraine

With the war in Ukraine resolved so quickly, Chinese President Xi Jinping would have to think twice about implementing his plan to blockade and/or invade Taiwan to force its reunification with the Chinese mainland by 2025, knowing that the US would no longer be bogged down fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and could allocate America’s full military might to respond to a crisis in the western Pacific. Furthermore, the Biden administration would not have unilaterally disarmed the US military of its most advanced weapons to such a massive extent to transfer to Ukraine so the US military would be much more prepared to fight a potential war against Chinese aggression. Perhaps as a result of a swift end to the Russo-Ukrainian War on mutually acceptable terms designed to restore Russia’s ties with the West, China might have been deterred from attempting to forcibly reunite with Taiwan in the near future.

Ukraine’s Dark, Uncertain Future

For fourteen years, Russian President Vladmir Putin was happy to allow Ukraine to keep 100% of its internationally recognized territory. Then following the February 2014 Biden authorized CIA-backed Maidan coup overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia re-occupied and annexed the Crimean Peninsula and Russian backed separatists fought for control of the Donbass region. Putin offered Ukraine control of 96% of its internationally recognized territory including all of the Donbass region under the Minsk II agreement in 2015 but Ukraine refused to implement it. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Putin offered Ukraine control of 93% of its internationally recognized territory up to its pre-war borders but Zelensky refused. Then in September 2022, Putin offered Ukraine 82% of its internationally recognized territory and Zelensky responded by outlawing all peace talks with Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has destroyed democracy in Ukraine by declaring martial law and canceling the presidential election overstaying his term, likely having second thoughts about rejecting Russia’s March 2022 offer to withdraw all of its troops from Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine expelling all NATO troops from its territory and becoming the Switzerland of Eastern Europe.

Now, Putin is offering Ukraine control of a little over 77% of its territory and again Zelensky has rejected his offer. If a Russian offensive succeeded in overrunning all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River line that would only leave 55% of Ukraine under Ukrainian control. That is not an unrealistic scenario at all. Accordingly, Biden and Zelensky would be wise to declare victory in terms of succeeding in keeping Ukraine independent and preventing Russia from overrunning all of Ukraine and installing a more pro-Russian Ukrainian government and accept Putin’s peace terms. If they do not, then Russia will most likely launch a massive offensive later this summer to overrun eastern Ukraine and the war will continue to escalate with the loss of hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians that could lead to the outbreak of World War Three.

Rational thinking conservative Republican members of Congress have repeatedly asked the Biden administration to articulate a strategy for how they intend to accomplish their avowed mission to “win” the war in Ukraine without success as senior Biden administration officials have been unwilling to go on public record  admitting the true purpose of the war from the US government perspective perhaps out of fear that if the US public learned the war is being fought for US, not Russian, imperialism, they would not support it. However, the Biden strategy to “win” the war in Ukraine is entirely unachievable as Russian President Putin has stated repeatedly, he is willing to fight a nuclear war with the US and its NATO allies, if necessary, to expel NATO from Ukraine.

Biden’s policy of national suicide in fighting a never-ending proxy war in Ukraine is now threatening to escalate without warning to the nuclear level, potentially costing the lives of a billion people as part of Biden’s futile quest to ensure Ukraine remains part of America's liberal empire. In response to Biden’s unbelievably foolish and provocative decision to authorize Ukraine to use long-range US missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia including Russian nuclear bomber bases potentially authorizing the use of Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons against Ukraine and NATO, Putin announced he would supply long range missiles to enemies of the US across the world including Cuba and Venezuela (and likely terrorist groups as well) with which to strike the US and its overseas militarybases. He also dispatched a Russian naval flotilla including the frigate Admiral Gorchov and the nuclear missile submarine Kazan both of which carry Zircon hypersonic nuclear missiles to conduct nuclear warfighting exercises 25-66 miles off the Florida coast.

While Putin has shown tremendous strategic patience to Biden’s increasing provocations in fighting an ever-escalating proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, his patience appears to be running thin and he could engage in catastrophic retaliatory attacks against the US and NATO including the US homeland without warning. Most alarmingly, leaked Ukrainian intelligence assessments estimate Russia now has 16,000 nuclear weapons including over four times as many operational strategic nuclear weapons as the US has and 66 times more non-strategic nuclear weapons. With that level of nuclear supremacy over the US, Putin is much less likely to be concerned about a US nuclear response if he decides to use non-strategic nuclear weapons against Ukraine or even America’s NATO allies. Even Biden administration officials are now saying that in view of the massively increased Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals and their increasing threats of nuclear use against us, the US should start increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

In September 2022, I wrote a peace proposal for a permanent cease-fire and Korean-style armistice along the line of control that could have ended the war nearly two years ago. While Putin stated for the first time yesterday that any peace agreement would have to be along the lines of the constitutional borders of the four Russian annexed oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, the other elements of my proposal could still be implemented. The US must take immediate action to mediate an end to the war along the lines of my proposal before it is too late. Realistically, howver, the diplomatic logjam will only be broken either if Russia makes massive territorial gains or if a new US President is elected who supports a policy of peace through strength rather than war through weakness as Biden has done. We can only hope and pray that President Trump is re-elected to restore rationality and sanity to the White House so he can pressure Zelensky to accept a cease-fire immediately after he is inaugurated to end the immediate threat of Russian nuclear escalation to the US and its NATO allies.

In his speech yesterday, President Putin again called for the establishment of a new security architecture in Europe that recognized the security interests of all states including Russia to ensure international peace and stability as it proposed most recently in December 2021 with draft mutual security treaties with both the US and NATO which could be used as a basis for negotiations. Accordingly, the U.S. should come to an agreement with Russia that if it agrees to a modern day Reinsurance Treaty and pledges to remain neutral in the event of the outbreak of a potential conflict with Communist China over Taiwan, which the U.S. would nevertheless do everything it could do to avoid by implementing a new strategy to counter China though entirely peaceful means, the U.S. will rescind all remaining economic sanctions on Russia and provide a written guarantee that Ukraine will never join the NATO alliance. NATO and Russia should agree to a Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) II Treaty in which western NATO countries would withdraw all its troops from eastern Europe in exchange for a Russian military withdrawal from Belarus and Ukraine. Such a mutual security agreement could permanently end hostilities between NATO and Russia long-term by recognizing Russia’s legitimate security concerns in Europe, thereby ending the specter of a nuclear Third World War between NATO and Russia, which today is greater than it was even during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 while effectively serving to neutralize the existential threat posed by Russia’s military alliance with China.

© David T. Pyne 2024

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently served as Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. He has also co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster” and his new book “Restoring Strategic Deterrence” will be published in early fall 2024. He serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Recent Media Interviews

May 15th—Panel Discussion about the motive for and the ramifications of the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico on a Twitter Space hosted by Mario Nawfal

May 20th--Interview with COL Rob Maness (USA Ret.) on Patriot TV to discuss the weakness and vulnerabilities of the US Navy in a war with Communist China. Here is a link to the interview.

May 21st—Interview with Jon Twitchell on the “Talk with John” radio show on KTALK AM 1640 to discuss Russia’s new Kharkiv offensive in northern Ukraine, potential motivations for the assassination of Iran’s President and the inaugeration of Taiwan’s pro-independence President which China has stated would guarantee war. Here is the link.

May 23rd—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss China’s Joint Air and Naval Blockade exercises designed to punish Taiwan for its new President’s inaugural speech criticizing China which they condemned as “confessing independence” and leading to war as well as Speaker Johnson’s decision to call on Biden to allow Ukraine to use long range US missiles to target Russia, perhaps provoking Russia to attack the US directly in response. Here is the link to the interview.

May 31st—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss Trump’s conviction on bogus charges, Biden’s plans to steal the presidential election and Zelensky’s decision to stay in office past his term as Ukraine’s dictator and Biden’s plans to follow his example. Here is the link to the interview.

June 4th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on his “Talk with John” radio show on KTALK AM 1640 to discuss Trump’s conviction on bogus charges, Zelensky’s decision to stay in office past his term as Ukraine’s dictator and Biden’s plans to follow his example as well as Biden’s and Zelensky’s efforts to provoke Russian nuclear escalation. Here is the link to the interview.

June 4th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on Main Street Radio to discuss Trump’s conviction on bogus charges, Zelensky’s decision to stay in office past his term as Ukraine’s dictator and Biden’s plans to follow his example as well as Biden’s and Zelensky’s efforts to provoke Russian nuclear escalation. Here is the link to the discussion.

June 6th—Interview with Mormon Renegade to discuss the increasing possibility Biden will stumble the US into a simultaneous world war with Russia over Ukraine and with China over Taiwan while discussing Biden’s end game in Ukraine and whether he plans to imprison Trump, triggering a constitutional crisis.

June 13th—Interview with Stew Peters on the Stew Peters show to discuss Russian nuclear warfighting exercises being conducted by a flotilla consisting of a nuclear missile submarine and a guided missile frigate 66 miles off the coast of Florida in response to Biden’s decision to authorize Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory using long-range US missiles. Here is the link to the interview.

Upcoming Media Interviews

June 18th—Interview with Jon Twitchell to discuss Biden’s and Zelensky’s efforts to provoke Russian nuclear escalation, Russian Navy nuclear missile exercises off the Florida coast, Putin’s new peace proposal which is likely his last before Russia begins a largescale invasion of northern Ukraine as well as my upcoming new peace proposal in which Russia would agree to allow western Ukraine to join NATO in exchange for eastern Ukraine joining the Russian-led CSTO alliance.

June 25th-Interview on National Security Hour, sponsored by The Epoch Times, on I-Heart Media to discuss the victory of nationalist parties in the EU elections, Macron’s decision to hold snap parliamentary elections in France as well as the connection between the war in Ukraine to the nationalist party resurgence.

July 12th—I will be giving a presentation to Utah’s Constitutional Conservatives in Logan to show US mistakes over the past century that have made the world far less safe and free as well as how the US can avert an unnecessary nuclear war with the Sino-Russian alliance.