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Newly published documents from invasion’s first weeks reveal Putin’s plans to render post-war Ukraine powerless

Source: Current Time

RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit Systema has obtained a copy of Russia’s initial proposal for a “peace agreement” with Ukraine, which the Kremlin drafted shortly after launching its full-scale war against the country in 2022. The document reveals exactly what Russia was seeking in the full-scale war’s first weeks and how it envisioned Ukraine’s future if it surrendered. Meduza shares an abridged translation of Systema’s report on the previously unpublished proposal, what it shows about Putin’s intentions, and how Russia’s demands evolved in the subsequent months as it failed to achieve its goals on the battlefield.

Journalists from Systema have obtained the earliest known document in which Moscow laid out its demands for Ukraine after launching the full-scale invasion. Russia presented the proposal, which contains a list of conditions for a ceasefire and peace agreement, to Ukraine’s delegation during the countries’ third round of talks in Belarus on March 7, 2022. Systema received the document from a Ukrainian source familiar with the course of the negotiations and a source from the Russian side verified its authenticity.

The first official meeting between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators took place just a few days after the start of the full-scale war. The Ukrainian delegation, led by Verkhovna Rada deputy Davyd Arakhamia, traveled to Poland before taking a helicopter to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s Lyaskovichi Residence near the Polish-Belarusian border. There, the group met with a Russian delegation led by Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky.

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The document consists of six pages containing the draft agreement’s main text and four pages of attachments. The proposal’s 18 articles touch on a wide range of issues, including requirements for Ukraine’s neutrality, border placement, and humanitarian concerns such as language, religion, and history.

The proposal was written long before Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions in September 2022 and does not include the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. However, it does include Russia’s long-standing demand for Ukraine to fully forgo any claims to Crimea and Sevastopol as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

In the initial version of this “peace agreement,” Russia also insisted on the near-total disarmament of Ukraine under Moscow’s supervision, the country’s isolation from Western assistance, and the long-term stationing of Russian troops on the territories captured in the war’s first weeks. Some of these demands remained unchanged throughout the entire negotiations process.

In early March, the Ukrainian delegation tentatively agreed to what appears to have been Russia’s main demand: to become a “permanently neutral state” that would never join NATO or allow foreign troops to be stationed on its territory. Throughout the negotiation process in 2022, until its suspension in April, this point remained unchanged and was not disputed by either side.

After comparing this version of the proposed agreement with later ones, Systema’s journalists were able to identify multiple points that either disappeared from the document, were heavily modified, or that Ukraine’s delegation began refusing to discuss altogether. These details make clear just how extensive Russia’s demands were.

Russia’s initial demands

What Ukraine would receive in return

Essentially the only things Russia offered Ukraine in this initial proposal were a “ceasefire regime” and “measures to halt combat operations.” There was no mention of any withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory; Russia only committed to not occupying territory beyond what it already controlled.

At the same time, Moscow wanted Ukraine to withdraw all its forces to their permanent bases (or to places “designated by Russia”), and for Kyiv’s foreign partners to immediately end all assistance to Ukraine and withdraw any personnel involved with Ukrainian troops, including military advisors.

Russian troops, as well as national guard forces, were to remain in place until “all of the requirements of this agreement” were fulfilled. Since these requirements included large-scale legislative changes, disarmament, and international guarantees, the agreement could feasibly have seen the Russian army stationed near Kyiv for years. Russia also proposed taking control of the troop withdrawal process, allowing for the involvement of Ukraine and, if necessary, the U.N. Secretary-General.

“A distinction should be made between Putin’s public statements about the invasion’s goals and his real intentions, which have become clearer over time,” Eric Ciaramella, a Ukraine and Russia expert at the Carnegie Center, told Systema. For example, he said, while Putin used the term “denazification” in public statements, the word was concealing his true goals: the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected leadership, its replacement with a pro-Russian administration, the occupation of Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, and the establishment of filtration camps for patriotic and pro-Ukrainian activists and political leaders.

The same is true of Putin’s demand for Ukraine’s “neutrality,” Ciaramella said: “Some people hearing the word ‘neutrality’ might think, ‘What’s wrong with that? Putin just doesn’t want to see Ukraine in NATO.’ But in my view, he was actually talking about something more radical — not neutrality, but the neutralization of Ukraine as an independent state. Russia’s goal from the very beginning was to destroy Ukraine’s capacity for self-defense.”

This interpretation of Putin’s goals is supported by the document from March 7, including Russia’s demand for the Ukrainian army to be reduced to 50,000 people. “In this paradigm, Ukraine would simply have no ability to defend itself,” Ciaramella said.

In this early version of its “peace agreement,” Russia was effectively proposing the terms of Ukraine’s surrender, Ciaramella said. “The document was structured as if Ukraine were the aggressor and had been defeated on the battlefield — which wasn’t the case, of course,” he told Systema. “It’s hard to say if this was a genuine attempt at negotiation, as such terms would be unacceptable to any Ukrainian. They would have neutralized Ukraine to the point of leaving it utterly defenseless.”

How Russia’s conditions changed over time

The negotiations in the war’s first weeks were intense: after their initial meetings in Minsk in early March, the Russian and Ukrainian delegations frequently held calls, exchanged proposals, and recorded new versions and revisions on a daily basis.

“It was clear from the Russian delegation’s behavior that Putin was personally overseeing the process,” a Ukrainian politician with knowledge of the negotiations told Systema. “Sometimes when the [Ukrainian delegation] proposed something, [Russian delegation leader Vladimir] Medinsky would get up and leave to make a call — clearly to Moscow. Then he would return and present Putin’s stance on the matter.” Other sources from both Moscow and Kyiv who spoke to Systema confirmed that Putin appeared to be genuinely interested in signing some sort of agreement.

Comparing Russia’s proposals from March 7, 2022, to the last version of the draft agreement from April 15 of the same year, the degree to which Ukraine’s delegation managed to convince Moscow to reduce its demands and alter key points is striking. “Ukrainian negotiators were able to remove some of the most offensive points and include important elements for Ukraine, such as the need for security guarantees,” notes Ciaramella, who has examined several different versions of the agreement.

The most significant change concerned the security guarantee for a neutral Ukraine from the proposed signatory states (which included the U.K., China, the U.S., and France; Russia also proposed including Belarus, while Ukraine proposed Turkey). This article was modeled after NATO’s Article 5: if Ukraine were attacked in the future, the other countries would be obligated to defend it with military forces.

Another main change addressed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and international recognition of its borders. In March 2022, Russia’s proposed agreement stated that Crimea and Sevastopol were part of Russia, that there were independent Donetsk and Luhansk “republics,” and that the rest of Ukraine needed to be disarmed and rewrite its laws.

By April, the two sides had agreed on a different framework: Ukraine would remain within its internationally recognized borders, including Crimea, Sevastopol, and certain unspecified territories that would not be covered by security guarantees. The communiqué adopted at the end of March in Istanbul stated that the status of Crimea and Sevastopol would be resolved diplomatically. The provision was “stunning,” as Foreign Affairs wrote in 2024: for many years, Russia had publicly insisted that Crimea and Sevastopol were unequivocally Russian regions, and now it seemed to be “tacitly [admitting] that was not the case.”

In the April agreement, the Ukrainian and Russian delegations still disagreed on the size of Ukraine’s future army. Ukraine insisted on a force of 250,000 servicemen (its approximate size before the full-scale invasion), while Russia proposed limiting it to 85,000.

Additionally, the Russian side demanded that Ukraine’s troops lay down their arms and return to their barracks. In response, the Ukrainian side made a symmetrical demand: Russia’s troops should lay down their arms and return to their permanent bases. Medinsky was surprised by this proposal, one of the participants recounted: “He said it felt like Ukrainian troops were standing in Red Square while the Russians were expected to wave a white flag from the Kremlin. The response [from the Ukrainian side] was: ‘We’re just asking you for the same thing you’re asking of us.’” The delegations were ultimately unable to reach a consensus on the issue of troop withdrawals.

What Putin wants today

There’s no such thing as the “goals of the special military operation,” according to a source familiar with Putin’s position on the negotiations process: these “goals” will be whatever Putin decides is necessary for him to declare victory at the moment he decides to end the war. “If he wants, he’ll say he created a land corridor to Crimea and reclaimed ’Novorossiya’; if he prefers instead, he’ll say that he destroyed all of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. He can declare any outcome he chooses to be his victory and the achievement of his goals, at any moment.”

The only question is when Putin will decide to end the war — and what battlefield conditions are necessary for this to happen.

In October 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented his “victory plan”: a detailed outline of what the Ukrainian authorities believe Western partners should provide to Ukraine to prevent Russia from feeling it has the upper hand, pushing it to freeze the conflict and engage in negotiations. Among other things, this includes authorizing Kyiv to conduct deep strikes within Russia and admitting Ukraine into NATO.

Western officials and NATO leaders have increasingly spoken in recent months about the inevitability of Ukraine’s path to NATO. At the same time, there’s still plenty of disagreement on this issue among Ukraine’s allies, as Le Monde noted last month: the ultimate outcome will depend both on the results of the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and the future positions of individual NATO members.

According to Eric Ciaramella, however, the underlying logic of these statements is to influence how Putin reevaluates his goals in the war: the situation could change if he decides there’s no possible scenario in which Ukraine will capitulate and return to Russia’s orbit. “I think Western leaders are coming to the conclusion that the only way to make Putin have this realization is to make serious progress on a set of security guarantees for Ukraine, which could very well include NATO membership. Because that’s the only form of security guarantees in Ukraine that Russia truly understands.”

So far, however, there’s no sign that Putin has come to the same conclusion. In the summer of 2024, the Russian president said that for any negotiations to begin, Ukraine must agree that Crimea as well as the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions are part of Russia. A source familiar with Putin’s current position on negotiations told Systema that after the Ukrainian military’s cross-border offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, Putin has been actively conveying to his inner circle that Russia will fight until Ukraine capitulates completely.