Serhii Plokhy: prediction

Transcript context

…Why did the peace talks fail? There was a lot of peace talks. The main reason is that the conditions that Russia was trying to impose on Ukraine were basically unacceptable for Ukraine. Because one of the conditions apart from this strange thing called Denazification, was of course de facto loss of the territory. And for the future, really staying outside either of NATO or any Western support, which was very clear. You can buy a couple of weeks, you can buy a couple of months, but in the conditions like that Russia will come back tomorrow and will take over everything. And once Ukrainians realize that they can win on the battlefield, once the Russians were defeated and withdrew from Kiev, the opportunity emerged to get out of the negotiations, which was very clear were leading, if not today then tomorrow to the complete destruction of Ukraine. And then of course, once the territory started to be liberated, things like butcher and massacres of the civilian population came to the fore, which made also very difficult, if not impossible to conduct negotiations from this moral and emotional point of view. What about the claims that Boris Johnson, the West compromised the ability of these peace talks to be successful, basically manipulated the talks?…

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