A new account of the invasion of Ukraine shows how the president tried to use peace talks to gain an advantage on the battlefield.
Already a subscriber?Iwent to see President Zelensky in his office in Kyiv on July 22, 2022. The entire government neighbourhood had been cordoned off since February, the once-elegant city blocks devoid of traffic. Armoured fighting vehicles stood at crossroads. Sandbags lined the sidewalks. I entered the presidential palace on Bankova via a back door past several layers of military security. The building was dank and deserted, with only essential personnel working from their offices.
He picked up his phone to show the critical number he tracked every morning: Ukrainian battlefield casualties. It had declined to around 30 fatalities a day from some 200 a day at the height of the fighting for Severodonetsk weeks earlier, he said. For three years, Zelensky reminded me, Putin had refused to even take a phone call from him. “Now, nobody in Ukraine wants to talk to them. Talk about what? They’re not even terrorists. Terrorists at least keep hostages alive for some benefit. But these people, they destroy cities, they murder people, and then they say: let’s negotiate. With whom, with rocks?” Zelensky raised his voice. “They are covered in blood, and this blood is impossible to wash off. We will not let them wash it off.
After the losses in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, the Russians were on their back foot, with as few as 100,000 combat-capable troops left in Ukraine. A better opportunity to strike a decisive blow might not present itself. What Ukraine needed to succeed, Zaluzhny calculated, were about ninety more howitzers and adequate ammunition, according to his aides.It wasn’t a huge ask, but the Americans weren’t convinced.
On March 29, 2022, Russian and Ukrainian delegations gathered around a long table covered by a crisp white tablecloth in Istanbul’s Dolmabahce Palace, on the banks of the Bosporus. Expectations for this round of peace talks were high. At the head of the table, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered the opening speech. “It is up to the sides to stop this tragedy. Achieving a cease-fire and peace as soon as possible is to the benefit of everyone,” he intoned.
When his bloodied body was found a few blocks away later that day, officials in SBU, an agency that had been thoroughly infiltrated by Russian spies, claimed that Kireyev was a traitor who had been shot while resisting arrest. Ukraine’s rival GUR military intelligence service, where Kireyev had served undercover while pursuing a career in banking and business, was outraged. Three days later, GUR posted a photo of Kireyev, describing him as a hero who had died in the line of duty.
In July, Zelensky fired Bakanov under an article of the military statutes that involves negligence causing fatalities and other grave consequences. Bakanov disappeared from public view soon afterward, resurfacing a year later as a provincial lawyer in the Poltava region.