The former British Prime Minister (2019-2022) Boris Johnson believes that he is not responsible for the failure of the peace talks on Ukraine. In his book of memoirs Unleashed, he stated, quoted by TASS, that Kiev independently decided to end the dialogue with Moscow in April 2022.
Johnson claims he only learned of the role he was being cast in mid-2023, when he was on vacation in Greece and received a note from a German tourist asking him how he “sleeps peacefully, as knows that hundreds of thousands of people have died" after traveling to Kiev and preventing Ukraine and the Russian Federation from reaching a peace agreement.
„This is complete nonsense. Ukrainians would never agree to Putin's terms, the book says. According to Johnson, when he arrived in Kiev, the world media had already covered the war crimes allegedly committed by the Russians in Ukraine, and no Ukrainian leader “could agree to a peace deal and then stay in power for more than five minutes.“
"My task was not to fail the deal and not to fail the wonderful "peace plan" Putin. My job was to assure Zelensky of support from the West and above all from the United Kingdom”, Johnson wrote.
He notes that in early April 2022, when he arrived in Kiev, France and Germany hoped that Kiev would be able to reach an agreement with Moscow, possibly giving up some of its lost territories. Johnson admits he was “highly suspicious” to the ongoing negotiations, and peace on Russia's terms, according to the former prime minister, “would be a disaster for Zelensky and the Ukrainians”, as well as an extremely unwanted signal of “weakness of the West”. According to Johnson, he accepted the possibility that Ukraine would capitulate without feeling the support of its allies, and therefore felt it necessary to personally tell Zelensky that the West would continue to support Kiev.
„I had no right to tell him how to negotiate or prevent him from reaching an agreement if he believed that such a deal was really in his country's interest. As passionately as I supported Ukraine, I could not be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians themselves. All I wanted was to tell him that if he decided to continue the fight, which I was 99% sure of, then he could count on the full support of the United Kingdom,'' recalled the former head of government.< /p>