Ukraine could have avoided the 2022 escalation with Russia by dropping its NATO aspirations, a former advisor to President Joe Biden has told Russian pranksters.
Vovan and Lexus on Thursday released records of calls with two former members of Biden’s National Security Council in which they posed as Ukrainian presidential aide Igor Zhovkva. During the calls, Amanda Sloat, who served as senior director for Europe at the NSC, said that a Ukrainian declaration of neutrality in 2021 or early 2022 “certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life.”
“I was uncomfortable with the idea of the US pushing Ukraine” into taking that path, she added, noting that it would amount to “implicitly giving Russia some sphere of influence or veto power” on Kiev’s bid to join NATO.
Senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev commented on the revelation, saying on X that Biden’s “deep state PROVOKED a PREVENTABLE war.”
After the Western-backed armed coup in Kiev in 2014, the new authorities declared NATO membership a foreign policy priority. In late 2021, Moscow urged the US-led military bloc to suspend its expansion in Europe and in doing so address Russian national security concerns, but the Biden administration and European members rejected the proposal.
In the early weeks of the hostilities, Moscow and Kiev reached a preliminary agreement that would have entailed Ukraine adhering to neutrality and maintaining a limited standing army. However, the nascent deal was derailed by Western officials, particularly then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who told the Ukrainians to “just fight.”
Ex-NSC member Eric Green told the Russian pranksters that the failure of the Istanbul talks was not a missed opportunity, saying the Biden administration’s guiding principles were to assume the worst and have no regrets.
He suggested that Kiev should now craft a settlement that “contains enough ambiguity in it to allow Ukraine to do what it wants to do” while allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin “to believe that he has accomplished something.” The goal, he said, would be to “construct an end to the war that assumes that there will be another one”.
