IT IS FINISHED: NYT Reveals Contents of Hidden Istanbul Peace Agreement to End the SMO

I was right and I deserve a raise.

The Istanbul secret peace deal that we’ve been speculating about for years now on this blog was leaked. It turns out that Arestovich, Lukashenko and the other leakers were telling the truth, and so I, by extension, was too.

I’ll let the Black Colonel handle the executive summary. Here:

As you know, The New York Times recently published a draft agreement between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, discussed in April 2022 in Istanbul. The draft agreement contained 18 articles and 6 annexes. At the same time, the posted text of the draft agreement and five appendices to it do not contain Appendix No. 6, which aroused the greatest interest.

This appendice is a map, on it the territories of Ukraine were marked which were allegedly disputed. And their fate was allegedly going to be decided later during the meeting between Putin and Zelensky. In addition, interest in this map was also caused by the fact that the draft agreement does not say a word about the fate of the DPR and LPR, or the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.

Please read the draft agreement carefully.

I am personally doing the same thing and I think that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I will post a full analysis of this important document on my TLG channel.

So far, my initial opinion is that it is very good that it was not signed.

Ah, but it was signed. The ambassadors sent to Istanbul from both signs signed it. Or at least they did the finalized version — maybe it differed from this draft in some way. Maybe not:

What happened next was that Zelensky simply tossed it into the garbage after a visit by Boris Johnson urging him to fight on and pledging NATO support.

!!! IMPORTANT !!!

For a war to ostensibly liberate eastern Russians in Ukraine from a Nazi occupation, well, curiously, there’s literally none of that in the peace treaty. In fact, this is PROOF of the claim I made a year ago that the Kremlin signed away the independence of these Russian-speaking territories BECAUSE THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT RUSSIAN-SPEAKERS and anyone who told you otherwise is wrong, clearly. In the past, we could have said that these other analysts were simply making a mistake because of their fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Kremlin.

Sure, OK, fine.

But now we have the papers that PROVE that the Kremlin did not give a damn about Eastern Ukraine and so the justification for this war is proven to be FALSE. I expect the ZAnon Putin-cheerleaders to immediately apologize and course-correct in light of this new evidence. Since most of them style themselves as honest, moral and Christian men, I am sure that they are writing their apologies and retractions as we speak.

Don’t you agree? Doesn’t it seem so imminently likely to you as well? Yes?

Good, glad we agree.

…

Here are the points that the NYT thought were relevant to point out about the proposed peace deal.

But at some point, both sides could return to the negotiating table again — a scenario that is expected to be discussed as Ukraine gathers scores of countries, though not Russia, for a peace conference in Switzerland this weekend. If and when Ukraine and Russia resume direct negotiations, the issues raised in the documents produced at the start of the war, including the status of occupied Ukrainian territories and Ukraine’s future security guarantees, would remain relevant.

Russia initially wanted Ukraine to recognize Crimea as part of Russia.

“Ukraine recognizes the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol as an integral part (subjects) of the Russian Federation and, in this regard, shall make comprehensive changes to the national legislation.”

By April 15, both sides agreed to exclude Crimea from their treaty — leaving it under Russian occupation but without Ukraine recognizing it.

“Paragraph 1 of Article 2 and Articles 4, 5 and 11 of this Treaty shall not apply to Crimea and Sevastopol.”

An examination of the documents shows that the two sides clashed over issues including weapons levels, the terms of Ukraine’s potential membership in the European Union, and specific Ukrainian laws on language and culture that Russia wanted repealed. Ukraine’s negotiators offered to forgo NATO membership, and to accept Russian occupation of parts of their territory. But they refused to recognize Russian sovereignty over them.

Ukraine proposed never joining NATO or other alliances.

“Ukraine does not join any military alliances, does not deploy foreign military bases and contingents …”

Russia demanded that Ukraine make Russian an official language.

“Ukraine, within 30 (thirty) days after signing this Treaty, shall remove all restrictions on the use of the Russian language in any area in accordance with Annex 2.”

And they provide a helpful summary of how this information was gathered:

The Times is publishing the documents it obtained in full. They are treaty drafts dated March 17 and April 15, 2022, showing the two sides’ competing proposals and points of agreement; and a private “communiqué” at in-person talks in Istanbul on March 29 that summarized the proposed deal.

The documents were provided by Ukrainian, Russian and European sources, and confirmed as authentic by participants in the talks and other people close to them. Some aspects of these documents have emerged, but most of the material has not been previously disclosed.

In addition to reviewing the documents, The Times spent months interviewing more than a dozen Ukrainian, Russian and Western current and former officials and others close to the talks; they include three members of Ukraine’s negotiating team. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the negotiations.

“We managed to find a very real compromise,” Oleksandr Chalyi, a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, said at a panel discussion in Geneva last December. “We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”

But I know what you are thinking.

This is all just a propaganda lie! Citing NYT? Yet more proof that Rurik is a CIA agent!

OK, well, fine. Let’s read what Simonyan is publishing on RT to see what the eastern spooks (good, moral, Christian!) want us to believe in the interest of fairness and transparency or something.

RT:

The document published by NYT is also riddled with critical notes from both sides calling certain provisions or wordings “unacceptable.” The annotations reportedly do not show either Ukrainian opposition to the idea of recognizing Crimea as part of Russia or to formally granting independence to the Donbass republics.

Oh no!

Is Margarita in on the NATO discreditation plot!

Quick, someone throw her into prison!

Jokes aside (but who was joking?) yes, it seems like Kiev was willing to grant independence to Donbass and finally be rid of this headache once and for all. This exact same situation existed 9 years ago when Poroshenko offered Putin the Donbass, which the latter refused.

BUT, even by the time that we get to 2022 and the Special Policing Exercise in Ukraine, Putin was still not committed to “liberating” Donbass. But the propaganda would have us believe that he was ostensibly fighting a world war to liberate the entire world from Nazism!

The second document, dated to late March, was allegedly an internal joint communique, which expanded the list of security guarantors for Ukraine and added that the status of Crimea was to be determined by Moscow and Kiev during a period of 10 to 15 years.

Said another way — re-leasing Crimea and holding off on de jure recognition, but maintaining the de facto status quo there. Decades of uncertain bureaucratic limbo for patriotic Crimeans would have ensued.

But it only got worse.

The third document in the cache published by the NYT is reportedly a draft treaty agreement dated April 15, 2022. Under its provisions, Ukraine was still to become a permanently neutral nation in exchange for security guarantees, but was allowed to join the EU and participate in its “peacekeeping missions.” The decision on the status of Crimea was to be postponed.

They mean future peacekeeping missions in Donbass, clearly.

The Kremlin plan seemed to be to hope that Ukraine would hold off on killing all pro-Russians in Donbass and Crimea and then invading Russia until Putin and his cabal passed away from old age. Instead of kicking that can down the road a few decades though, they actually accelerated their own demise by showing such craven weakness to their esteemed Western partners. The only discernible goal of the Kremlin in foreign policy appears to be to run out the clock and to steal as much as possible without collapsing the state until then.

Kiev, according to the notes, refused to discuss sanctions on Russia and mutual legal claims filed with various international bodies. It also refused to consider issues related to the status of the Russian language inside Ukraine or banning Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda, according to the document.

And yet, despite the Kremlin’s claims that the war was fought get Kiev to protect the Russian-speakers and to pass more ideological draconian hate speech legislation on Slavs, Moscow signed an agreement with Kiev after Kiev refused.

Curious.

Moscow allegedly demanded any future military assistance to Ukraine be provided only on the basis of a collective decision by all security guarantors. This demand turned out to be the biggest problem for Kiev, the NYT claimed, adding that the parties also failed to agree on the range of weapons Ukraine would have been allowed to have.

But they went ahead with the agreement anyway though.

Despite, ostensibly, this being a war to achieve “demilitarization”. Instead, Moscow asked them to limit their arms (probably to at least not place American nukes on their territory) and Kiev said “nuh-uh” to which Moscow said, “lol, whatever”.

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin also said that the two sides had managed to reach an agreement that “was generally acceptable to both Moscow and Kiev.” A draft treaty was drawn up that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation, the president said. “That means that Kiev… was satisfied with such a solution.”

It also means that Putin was satisfied with the signed peace deal.

So, unless there was a dramatically altered final peace agreement, Putin signed on to:

• no demilitarization

• no ban on NATO military cooperation

• no Russian language guarantees

• no independence for “Novorussian” territories

• no recognition of integration of new territories, new borders (Crimea/LDNR)

• no freeing of pro-Russian political prisoners rotting away in SBU dungeons

• no guarantees of free speech/free press allowed to present pro-Russian perspectives in Ukraine

• no political guarantees for banned pro-Russian opposition groups

And here is how the NYT describes the final draft agreement that both sides signed on to:

A Breakthrough in Istanbul?

A few days later, on March 29, Russia and Ukraine’s representatives met at an Istanbul palace on the Bosporus. To some, the talks felt like a breakthrough driven by Russia’s battlefield struggles.

After each military setback, a member of Ukraine’s negotiating team said, Mr. Putin “reduced his demands.”

In Istanbul, the Russians seemed to endorse Ukraine’s model of neutrality and security guarantees and put less emphasis on their territorial demands. Afterward, Mr. Medinsky, Russia’s lead negotiator, said Ukraine’s offer of neutrality meant it was “ready to fulfill those principal demands that Russia insisted on for all the past years.”

Ukraine summarized the proposed deal in a two-page document it called the Istanbul Communiqué, which it never published. The status of Crimea was to be decided over a 10- or 15-year period, with Ukraine promising not to try to retake the peninsula by force; Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin would meet in person to finalize a peace treaty and strike a deal on how much Ukrainian territory Russia would continue to occupy.

Zelensky and Putin would meet to hash out final differences, according to the discussions in Istanbul.

“The parties consider it possible to hold a meeting on ... ... 2022 between the presidents of Ukraine and Russia with the aim to sign an agreement and/or make political decisions regarding the remaining unresolved issues.”

The communiqué, provided to The Times by a Ukrainian negotiator, described a mechanism in which other countries would intervene militarily if Ukraine were attacked again — a concept that the Ukrainians pointedly designated as Article 5, a reference to the mutual defense agreement in Article 5 of the NATO treaty.

To the Ukrainians, binding security guarantees were at the core of a potential peace deal that multiple countries would sign on to.

“Possible guarantor states: Great Britain, China, Russia, the United States, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel.”

“The Guarantor States and Ukraine agree that in the event of aggression, any armed attack on Ukraine or any military operation against Ukraine, each of the Guarantor States, after urgent and immediate consultations between them … will provide … assistance to Ukraine, as a permanently neutral state under attack…”

But Russian officials sent mixed signals in public on whether the Kremlin was really ready to sign onto the deal. The Russians and Ukrainians returned to hours long negotiating sessions by video call, exchanging treaty drafts via WhatsApp, negotiators said.

The last part is bogus — Putin has explicitly stated that he thought the ink was already dry on the agreement, so, yes, Russia signed on to this.

These “Guarantor States” that pledged to defend Ukraine should they be attacked sounds a lot like Kiev getting Moscow to acquiesce to a kind of NATO Article 5 collective defense agreement for Ukraine without calling it that.

Simply devastating.

…

I haven’t read the full 68 pages yet. But if something comes up that wasn’t initially reported, I’ll be sure to mention it in the coming days. And Russian Telegram will no doubt be full of interesting revelations soon too.

However, unless you sign up for a paid sub, I will no longer be sharing anything with you.

Despite gaining 300 some new subscribers over the last month, I haven’t gotten any new pledges of support. Until people sign up to support the blog again, I’ll simply go paywall mode. The support situation is so bad that my casual readers have proven to me that everything that our hostile elites say about the masses is more or less true as far as I am concerned.

You should be ashamed of yourselves for not supporting my work.

There is no other writer that has earned that support in the way that I have with my work over the past 2+ years and that is simply a fact.

But appeals to the masses’ non-existent better side fall on deaf ears.

I am simply going to write exclusively for the Stalkers for the next month going forward probably. I’m tired of nonsense like this:

I’m sorry, but this is simply not sustainable.

I’m not going to work under these conditions any longer.

I’m drawing a red line in the sand here. Until the black line goes back up to where it was a month ago, I’m boycotting my scum non-paying casual readers until further notice. You can go back to reading cope about how Putin checkmated the globalists by giving Kiev everything that they wanted if you like.

I wash my hands of your stupidity.

“Give us Absurdicus, Birdman, Fat Idiot and those other actual LITERAL spook state shills like Johnson, Ritter and Sachs instead!” they cried out to Pilate.”

If the fact that, once again, a core prediction of this blog made years before anyone else came true doesn’t prove that I know what I’m talking about, well, then nothing else will. In which case, you’re a lost cause anyway and not worth my time trying to reason at you.

Render unto Rurik what is owed him now.

And to the Stalkers, thank you. There are more revelations to come. We will get to the bottom of this mess eventually, together.