Ukraine’s former deputy foreign minister Oleksandr Chalyy has admitted that the sides reached a compromise and were close to a peace agreement at the Istanbul talks in March-April 2022.
Chalyy’s statement was quoted by the STRANA.ua news and analysis website.
According to him, he was in the group of Ukrainian negotiators at that time.
Chaly said that the Ukrainian and Russian delegations spent almost two months discussing a possible peace settlement agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
“And at the end of April we were very close to ending the war with some kind of peaceful settlement,” he said.
However, Chaly added that “for some reason” the agreements were thwarted.
In July 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Kiev was unwilling to fulfil the Istanbul agreements as part of the peace talks.
He also said that Kiev initialed a draft treaty with Moscow that was being prepared in Istanbul in March 2022, but after the Russian Armed Forces withdrew from Kiev, Ukraine threw it to the “dustbin of history”.