Oleksiy Arestovych, a former advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, went significantly beyond a simple call for peace negotiations with Russia. Arestovych told UnHerd’s Editor in Chief Freddie Sayers, in an interview released yesterday, saying, “We have to negotiate for an all-new security system for Europe, taking into account all sides of this problem.” He further stated later that “I think NATO has to discuss with Russia and Belorussia what it would take to guarantee not to use military force in Europe to decide political questions. … I should perhaps add that I am absolutely pessimistic that this will happen. I think we face 10 or 15 years of war in Europe,” having articulated an approach that had been insisted upon by Russian President Vladimir Putin for years up to February 2022.
Otherwise, the media have paid less attention to Arestovych’s standard for negotiations, than to his new comments on the March-April 2022 peace negotiations in Türkiye between Ukraine and Russia. He stressed to Sayers how close they had been to peace: “I was a member of the Istanbul process, and it was the most profitable agreement we could have done.” When they got back to Kiev, he said, they “opened the champagne bottle,” believing the agreement was a done deal. The protocols were “90% prepared” for a direct meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin in early April, said Arestovych, when Zelenskyy called off the talks.
