“It was the best deal we could have had.” Two years later, a Ukrainian negotiator is still bitter: unveiled by the German daily Die Welt, in an article spotted by Le Figaro on Monday, the deal could have ended the war just weeks after the Russian invasion.

Dated April 15, 2022, it provided security guarantees for Kiev in exchange for Ukraine’s “neutrality”, but was ultimately buried. A distant memory, while the situation on the front has continued to deteriorate in recent weeks.

“After we withdrew the troops from Kiev, as we promised, the Kiev authorities, as their masters usually do, threw all this into the dustbin of history,” Putin noted in June.

The head of the Ukrainian delegation during the talks, David Arakhamia, named Boris Johnson as guilty. He said that the British PM at the time had gone to Kiev on April 9, 2022 , to convince Zelensky to “sign nothing at all” with Russia . A “total absurdity”, Johnson responded affirming that he had only “expressed his concerns” about the nature of the agreement.