Russia has continually tabled peace proposals which have been repeatedly ignored or rejected.
1. Russia agreed to the Minsk accords of 2014 & 2015 (along with the Steinmeir Formula") which provided that Kiev withdraw from the Donbas (Russian-speaking area of eastern Ukraine) and that Kiev should revoke laws passed after the U.S. sponsored 2014 coup which prevented Russian-speakers from using the Russian language in municipal, cultural and education spheres. The Donbas would have more autonomy but would remain a part of Ukraine.
But this was never implemented.
Why?
Two guarantors of Minsk, Germany and France -no doubt under U.S. guidance- only signed in bad faith. They used the treaty to give Ukraine the time and opportunity to build up Ukraine's military in order to launch an attack. This was later admitted to by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande.
It was Merkel who ran to Putin begging him to stop the Donbas separatists from annihilating the Ukrainian army they had encircled.
So the Minsk accord was not implemented by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko who did not mind the deliberate policy of aerial bombings and artillery shelling of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas. Nor was Poroshenko concerned about the depraved conduct of neo-Nazi Banderite militias such as the Azov battalion, Aidar Battalion, Pravy Sektor's Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, and the OUN Battalion.
The Minsk accord was also not implemented by President Volodmyr Zelensky who ran on a peace ticket. When Zelensky physically went to the Donbas to ask the neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias to withdraw they (pardon my Anglo-Saxon) effectively told him to "fuck off". This was all caught on camera. It was filmed.
Zelensky's initiative was also followed by public threats against his life by figures from the extreme right whose power Western propaganda downplays, but whose militias provided the muscle which enabled the democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych to be overthrownin 2014.
2. Both Russia and Ukraine reached an agreement for peace in March/April of 2022 after the Istanbul Peace talks. But before it could be implemented, Boris Johnson (no doubt acting as an emissaryof the U.S.-led NATO) flew to Kiev and persuaded Zelensky to abandon the draft peace agreement.
3. Russia's peace proposal has been on the table for years. Talk of a ceasefire has only become pronounced because Ukraine is losing the war very badly.
The conflict in Ukraine which has been deliberately created by America and the West presents an EXISTENTIAL threat to the existence of Russia. This is the unquestioned feeling of Russia's political leadership and the Russian people.
Russia intervened in 2022 only after years of patience. Securing peace will not only be down to Ukraine, but must be consented to by the U.S. and its European vassals who are using Ukraine as a proxy to achieve the geopolitical goal of getting Russia to surrender its sovereignty.
All Ukraine has to do is to declare in a peace treaty and a revised constitution that it will:
. Be neutral
. Never join NATO
. Forfeit the 4 core regions of the Russian
speaking Donbas who conducted 2 sets of referenda in 2014 and 2022 to secede
from Ukraine and join Russia, a state to which they belonged historically
(Novorussiya)
. Forfeit Crimea which was Russian until Khrushchev
gave it to the Soviet Ukraine in 1953.
The above was essentially what Zelensky and his negotiating team agreed to after Istanbul in 2022.
Just imagine how many lives (mostly those of a generation of Ukrainian men) would have been saved if Ukraine had abided by the Minsk accords and the draft peace treaty after Istanbul.
The West is heartless about how many Ukrainian’s have perished and are only prolonging the conflict to save face.
They will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Russia cannot accept anything less than the aforementioned terms which would be enshrined in a treaty akin to the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 and a new Ukrainian constitution.
Putin has not refused the idea of a ceasefire. All he has insisted upon is that a ceasefire should be predicated on a guarantee of talks leading to a new security architecture on the European continent - something that should have been accomplished after the end of the Cold War but which was not pursued by the hubristic U.S. which has sought to destroy Russia (and China) because it did not want a peer competitor to challenge it military and economic global hegemony after the fall of the U.S.S.R.
A ceasefire alone cannot be agreed upon by Russia which was fooled by the West over Minsk. Russia also watched the West sabotage the draft Istanbul peace treaty. Accepting a ceasefire would only give time to the West to rebuild Ukraine's military. It would only delay a resumption of a Western-backed attack on Russia.
If Putin accepted less, he would almost certainly be removed from power and a hardliner would replace him with the overwhelming support of the Russian political class and the Russian masses.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2025).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He has an interest in geopolitics.
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