Belarusian authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, in an interview with Russia 1 TV host Olga Skabeeva, said that in March last year Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to negotiate with the authorities Ukrainians on the status of Crimea.
According to Lukashenka, Putin personally handed him a draft peace treaty with Ukraine, which had already been approved by the countries’ delegations. The document, according to Lukashenka, spelled out a “long-term lease” of the annexed Crimea, and it was proposed to discuss the issue of ownership of Donbass at a personal meeting of the heads of Russia and Ukraine in Turkey.
“If Russia read this document now, it would go crazy. It was absolutely unprofitable for Russia. But Russia agreed,” says Lukashenka.
Earlier, Oleksii Arestovich, a former adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine, spoke about the existence of a draft peace treaty. According to him, in the spring of 2022, after the first heavy losses of the Russian army, Russia gave up almost all of its claims put forward before the start of the war, including control of Crimea and Donbass. Among the demands that remained were a reduction in the size of the Ukrainian armed forces to 50,000 personnel, a non-bloc status of Ukraine and granting the Russian language the status of a second state language. According to Arestovich, the negotiating groups of the countries had already agreed on a personal meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy, but at the last moment the Ukrainian president refused any negotiations with the leader of Russia. The reason, according to a former adviser to the president’s office, was the tragedy in the Ukrainian town of Bucha – after its liberation by the Ukrainian army, the bodies of dozens or hundreds of civilians killed during the Russian occupation were found there. .
The Russian and Ukrainian delegations, in the first weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, were negotiating in Belarus and Turkey. During a meeting in Istanbul, they would then have previously agreed on a document mentioning in particular Ukraine’s refusal to join NATO in exchange for security guarantees and that the decision on the status of Crimea would be postponed. However, there were no more meetings, the document was not signed.
On Wednesday evening, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s claim that Russia has agreed to discuss the rental of Crimea with Ukraine. “No it’s not. Crimea is an integral part of the Russian Federation, it’s a Russian region,” Peskov said.
At the beginning of April last year, after the Russian army left the region of Kiev previously occupied and held for a month and Ukrainian troops entered it, the bodies of hundreds of civilians were found in the town of Bucha . According to the testimony of residents of Bucha, Russian soldiers shot, raped and tortured the local population. Later, the Ukrainian authorities officially accused the Russian side of numerous war crimes. The Russian Ministry of Defense rejected Every expense. The department said in a statement that the photos and videos of Bucha were a provocation and a “staging of the Kiev regime for the Western media”, and most of the corpses appeared after the Ukrainian army entered the city. the city. However, analysis of satellite images refuted the Russian department’s reports. According to the investigators, the elements received allow us to say that the bodies of those killed appeared in the streets of Bucha at a time when the city was under the total control of Russian military personnel.
In Russia, dozens of criminal cases and hundreds of administrative cases have been filed against those who disseminated information about what happened in Bucha. Many defendants were sentenced to long prison terms.
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