People say Ukraine could have made a deal with Russia at the end of 2022. But how, when everyone wants a return to 1991 borders? Former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba on the negotiations

Could Ukraine really have ended the war in previous years – and why didn't that happen? It's a question that keeps coming back with every new round of negotiations.

And now is no exception, as Ukraine prepares for a possible meeting with US and Russian representatives. Two European leaders – Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre – have attempted to join in, but got no further than listening to a lecture on medieval Slavic history delivered by Vladimir Putin. The Russian side has refused to consider European involvement.

In this interview with Ukrainska Pravda, Dmytro Kuleba, who headed Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for over four years, explains why the current negotiations are different from all the others since the start of the full-scale invasion.

We spoke with the former minister about what kind of realistic peace scenario would be beneficial to Ukraine, what US President Donald Trump is actually looking for, and whether Putin is interested in oil and gas deals in exchange for freezing the front line.

"He who pays the piper calls the tune"

Ukraine has entered a new round of negotiations with the US and Russia, and Norway and Finland have joined them. Do you think history is going to repeat itself, or will something come of it this time?

This time the negotiations have been initiated by the president of the United States, and Europe is being drawn into this vortex. Trump is trying to form a new configuration in which Europe will take part not through the E3 – Germany, France and the United Kingdom – but Finland and Norway. The warm-up round of negotiations took place in Oslo – the president [Zelenskyy] met with [US presidential envoy Steve] Witkoff there. The president of Finland and the prime minister of Norway spoke with Putin. They are testing out other people from whom they expect greater compliance.

Finland is of less interest to us here, but Norway is a key player for Ukraine, one of the largest donors. And he who pays the piper calls the tune. We'll see how this ends.

I belong to the apocalyptic school of thought: this is all ripples on the water, which Putin needs for several purposes. Firstly, to ascertain what he can gain at the negotiating table that he cannot gain on the battlefield. Secondly, to appease Trump: "Look, I'm being constructive. Don't do anything bad to me, because I'm cooperating." And there's a third objective – to use this process to set the Americans – Trump and his team – against us.

Putting the apocalyptic perspective aside and assuming that Putin truly wants to reach an agreement, there are signs that the Americans are really tightening the screws on Ukraine now. President Zelenskyy has reported for two days in a row that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is not signing off on the transfer of Patriot and NASAMS systems that have already been purchased. There's a reason why that's happening.

We are being pushed to say "Fine, we surrender" and become more compliant. Then the agreement can take shape. But again, that's if you believe that Putin is genuinely seeking an agreement. Personally I don't believe that.

As foreign minister you took part in negotiation processes for over four years. Based on your experience, is this the most intense pressure there has been on Ukraine from all sides, or was it worse before?

The worst moment was at the end of February 2025, after the infamous Oval Office meeting, when everything fell apart: official intelligence sharing was halted, the support programme was wound down, and everything was completely cut off. That was the hardest time, because at that point we had no idea how we would manage without all of that. If someone had told us in October 2024 that within four months America would turn its back on us, we would have been clutching our heads.

The uncertainty made the situation extraordinarily dramatic. But now we have already gone through the process of adaptation. Charles Darwin teaches us that in nature it is not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable. We've walked this path for a year and a half, and somehow we're managing to get by.

So I don't think that now is the worst-case scenario: we have experience of adapting to deteriorating external conditions. The only question is how much longer we are all capable of adapting.

Do you see any signs that Europe might join in the pressure [on Ukraine] this time as well?

No. Theoretically, someone might whisper in Zelenskyy's ear behind closed doors: "Just say yes. It's only going to get worse from here on in." But at the level of the decisions Ukraine needs today to go on resisting, I don't see any pressure from the Europeans.

They have a different problem – an inferiority complex. "We're not at the table, not leading the process. Trump is talking, we're not. Let us talk too." Sometimes reports appear in the news that Europe is almost holding a competition over who's going to represent it at the negotiations.

Capitulation, pressure on Ukraine, will manifest in one very simple issue – money. For the future of the war, there is no more important issue today.

Of course, weapons, resilience, mobilisation – all of that is important. But actually the issue is money, and the Europeans have that leverage. All they have to do is come and say to Kyiv: "Guys, we love you a lot, and we've scraped together some money for 2027. You're asking for more, but we just can't do it. So about 2028 – we're sorry."

Isn't that what's literally happening right now?

Not yet. A battle is going on now inside the EU itself over the European Union's budget. As of today, there's money for Ukraine allocated in it. But European leaders are asking the European Commission to make significant budget cuts. As far as I'm aware, the issue of reducing funds specifically for Ukraine is not on the table right now. But it could arise at any moment.

Especially with elections coming up in France next year, and obviously the continued AfD (Alternative for Germany) marches. This will reduce the room for political manoeuvre.

So the Americans are exerting pressure, while the Europeans can't stay on the sidelines and want to be part of the process. That's normal, because it's a European war. But so far I see no evidence that the Europeans have joined forces with the Americans to put pressure on Ukraine.

How would you characterise the new negotiators from Europe – Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb?

With Stubb, it's a case of a country that, to quote Trump, "has no cards" suddenly finding itself at the centre of world politics thanks to a charismatic leader. He knows how to express the right ideas, and he's understood by the Russians, specifically Putin, given the past experience of cooperation. And he plays golf with Trump.

It's interesting when a country suddenly finds itself at the centre of politics because such a complex figure was elected president. But with all due respect for his intellectual capabilities, Stubb interests me less: Finland is not crucial for Ukraine from the point of view of its role in the Coalition of the Willing, whereas Norway is.

Norway, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark – this is the backbone that we cannot afford to lose. I've crossed paths with the Norwegian prime minister, I know him. I have no reason to believe that he would be prepared to throw Ukraine under the bus, so to speak, just to make it all stop. In Norway they also understand very clearly the threat that Russia poses, and not only to Ukraine.

Finland has no leverage over Ukraine, but Norway does. That includes weapons, especially F-16 fighter jets – they're among the participants in that programme – and above all macro-financial support.

Another question is why the leaders of Germany, the UK and France were removed from the negotiation process and these two were brought in.

"A sort of 'peace now party' has emerged in Ukraine"

In your opinion, is Russia interested in negotiations this time?

If we analyse their advances and ours, there's still a balance on the battlefield. The inability to achieve a decisive result there is shifting the burden of the war into the air. We need to break the situation somehow. The country that attacked and the country defending itself rely on three simple elements: will, resources and global circumstances. When you knock out one of them, the chances of victory over the enemy increase significantly. Airstrikes break the will.

Putin's teasing of Trump – "Donald, I'm ready, you know how to stop those Ukrainians, it's your puppet regime" – is aimed at changing the global circumstances. Europe, the sole source of money for Ukraine today, needs to be drawn into the process in such a way that it stops its funding.

The Russian imperial project is not compatible with the project of an independent, sovereign, European Ukraine. At all.

Only one will remain. I believe it must be us.

But there are other hypotheses as well. The second one goes like this: "Let's give them what they're asking for – after all, it worked for Mannerheim." And the third is the idea that Putin is a rational player with whom a mutually beneficial relationship can be built up.

Is Steve Witkoff a supporter of the third concept?

He seems to be. Meanwhile, a sort of "peace now party" has emerged in Ukraine – representatives of the second school of thought: "Let's give up everything they're asking for just to make it all stop."

I believe a significant section of the public is prepared for that scenario too, although it's far from certain that the underlying hypothesis – that Putin would be satisfied with Donbas – actually holds water.

There are some documents that our Western partners are trying desperately to forget. Specifically the memorandum that the Russian Foreign Ministry handed to the US delegation in November 2021. It says: "Dear United States of America, please roll back NATO's borders to where they were in 1997." That means the whole of Central Europe – the entire socialist bloc, the Warsaw Pact countries – would have to be left defenceless.

Why those specific borders?

The post-World War II European order was the moment when the Russian Empire reached its zenith. Stalin became the greatest Russian emperor in history. No one before him had ever managed to expand Moscow's influence the way he did. That's who Putin models himself on.

More than once in Ukraine, I have met people who knew Putin and had experience of negotiating with him, and yet they still said: "Come on, he's a mathematician, this is purely about the money. We just need to make a deal: a billion here, a billion there."

Incidentally, a lot of people thought the same about Trump, especially during his first presidency. But second-term Trump isn't a businessman anymore – he's a messiah. He has a completely different picture in his head: "If the house is on fire, let the whole village burn – I'm still going to paint this picture." Putin is in the exact same phase.

In my view, we can't buy him off. Neither can Europe. There will be a war in Europe.

"We'd liberated Kyiv Oblast, Russia had turned out to be not so terrifying after all, so why should we have surrendered?"

In the first few years of the full-scale invasion, there was a lot of debate in Ukraine over why the Ukrainian authorities hadn't warned the public that war was approaching. Now that question is being superseded by another: was there a real opportunity to reach an agreement, and if so, why wasn't it taken? Is it true that in March 2022 Ukraine could have agreed to terms that were far more acceptable than the ones Russia is putting forward now?

I don't know all the details, but from what is known, those terms were written in the very same hand.

I have great respect for my former colleagues who conducted the negotiations on the so-called Belarusian track, which later turned into the Istanbul track, but it was an act of capitulation. The conversation was merely about sprucing it up a bit for appearances.

For example, there was also a discussion back then about reducing the size of the military. They said we could maintain a military of 50,000 personnel, while we proposed 250,000, which was the peacetime strength of our armed forces at the time as established by law. In essence, we weren't making a concession, but once you allow another country to cap your armed forces, it's game over.

They explicitly said: hand over all the missiles and all the long-range weapons, lock them away in depots, and grant Russian forces access to them.

Remember the era of the Hetmanate [a Ukrainian Cossack state that existed in the 17th and 18th centuries – ed.]. How did Moscow's infiltration of Ukraine begin? It began when the hetman agreed that Muscovite troops could be stationed in key cities.

If anyone wonders why Kyiv has a Striletska Street and a Reitarska Street when we had neither streltsy [17th-century Russian riflemen – ed.] nor reiters [cavalrymen – ed.] before the Sich Riflemen [an early 20th-century Ukrainian military unit – ed.]: these trendy hipster streets in Kyiv were once the quarters of the Russian military garrison. In 1654 and 2022 alike, it could have started the same way: with all military depots being guarded by the Russians.

Why do you think the rest of history cannot repeat itself? Baturyn [the Hetmanate capital razed by Russian troops in 1708, with its inhabitants massacred – ed.], the Holodomor [a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s that claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians – ed.] – take your pick.

In 2022, it was capitulation with a bit of make-up on to make it look pretty. Right now I'm reading, seeing and hearing the same things: renounce NATO [aspirations], accept some kind of limits on the military, lift sanctions for the sake of peace. Okay, sanctions can be lifted…

Let Russian gas flow again.

Let Russian gas flow again, rewind everything back to how it was. What is the fundamental difference? Perhaps one day we will be able to look at the two texts and compare them word for word. But I do not see any fundamental concessions from Russia now compared to what was discussed in the spring of 2022.

Do you remember the first talks in Gomel Oblast, Belarus, involving Arakhamiia, Reznikov, Umierov, Podoliak, Kostin and Tochytskyi? Who decided on the delegation, and why weren't you there?

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not determine the members of that delegation. In my view, not only should I not have been there, the defence minister [Reznikov] shouldn't have either. What if he had been poisoned or killed? Ukraine would have had no defence minister.

In negotiations like these, you shouldn't send ministers straight away. That's basic negotiation theory. You should always structure negotiations like a layer cake so that the lower level can press pause: "Sorry, we can't agree to anything right now – we need to consult our superiors." That's common sense tactics. If you send top officials straight away, they're told: "Who do you need to consult?"

That's a tactic I used with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov when we met in Antalya.

He said: "I'm not authorised to make decisions." I pulled out my phone: "Let's call our presidents right now and get the authority." [Ukrainska Pravda does not recognise Vladimir Putin as president – ed.]

As far as I remember, we sent everyone to Belarus: "the living, the dead, and the unborn" [an allusion to a famous poem by Taras Shevchenko, here meaning everyone imaginable – ed.]. Yet at the very first meeting, the Russians told them: "We don't decide anything, that's not why we're here." It was just a performance to show that they were in favour of peace.

In my view, at the beginning of the full-scale war, negotiations were in Ukraine's interest: we didn't know whether we'd hold out, and we needed to start talking just in case. Ultimately, both sides had a clear motivation.

The first and second meetings didn't go very well; at the third, the Russians suggested going through the parameters. The culmination was the meeting in Istanbul. By that point, however, the circumstances were fundamentally different: Kyiv Oblast had been liberated. We had held our ground, and Russia had turned out not to be so terrifying after all, so why should we have signed an act of capitulation? Added to that was the pressure of what had been witnessed in Bucha.

Then the blame game began – the final chord of the diplomatic game: "It wasn't me, it was them; I would have done it."

Ukraine won the first round: it avoided a trap in which a capitulation agreement would have been forced upon it and it would have been compelled to sign it. Sadly, however, Russia won the round in the battle of narratives over who was to blame for the war not ending.

They put out a simple, easy-to-grasp story about the bloodthirsty West personified by an evil, dishevelled Boris Johnson, who came and told Zelenskyy to "fight to the last Ukrainian". Sadly, I have to admit they played that story brilliantly.

We won by avoiding the trap, and they won by avoiding the blame.

Another equally interesting Russian narrative is that their troops withdrew from Kyiv Oblast under an agreement, rather than because they were driven out…

Back then, it was clear that Kyiv could not be taken from the north. There was no longer any point in keeping the force there: it was being ground down, and there would be no advance. The Russians decided to sell this politically as a major concession at the talks. But we didn't buy it.

It was certainly not a case of him [Putin – ed.] being able to achieve something and choosing not to for the sake of the talks. There was a recognition that that flank was bogged down and was not going to achieve its objectives. Therefore its withdrawal had to be sold at the highest possible price. So they launched that sales pitch.

Yet even after the Russian forces [retreated] in Kyiv and Kherson oblasts, the negotiations continued and drew in new players, such as Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. What was his role and who brought him in?

A German acquaintance of mine sent me a long article about the story of a secret peace deal recounted by Alexander Rodnyansky, the former co-owner of the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1. He asked: "What do you think about this?" I replied that there were dozens of stories like that in 2022-2023. Now it all sounds like a spy novel, and people love it: this guy went there, nuclear weapons were involved, someone passed something under the table…

What's it all about? Nothing. Abramovich is a well-known figure. It's fine for people to show up and try to do something. We should be grateful to them for those efforts. But there are only two people capable of making the final decisions: Putin in Russia and Zelenskyy in Ukraine. Putin became so fixated on achieving all his objectives, on breaking us and grinding us down, that stories like these hit the ceiling and collapsed. It took away people's desire to do anything.

So when, five years on, we hear once again that Roman Abramovich came to Kyiv and passed something on to someone... He came, he passed it on – so what?

Meanwhile, when President Zelenskyy refused to leave Kyiv, the entire chain of command received a clear signal: we're fighting back. People varied a lot back then too – the president even made some of them turn around when they were already on their way out and sent them back to Kyiv. He set the direction in which we were moving.

Did Zelenskyy rely on the situation on the battlefield?

At that point, Zelenskyy was a wartime leader in the making. He had a clear understanding of public sentiment. People are now saying that there was a chance of reaching an agreement with Russia at the end of 2022. Incidentally, I agree: we could have tried.

But how could we when the public was euphoric? Just a little more, and we'd make up for 300 years of our history and punish the Russians. People had fire in their eyes: the 1991 borders. The government felt the same way, and I was caught up in it too. The only thing was, I understood that restoring the 1991 borders would not, in itself, mean peace. Putin wasn't going to say: "Okay, you've driven me out. Goodbye, you can do what you like." But I agreed with the idea that we could make them crumble and push them out.

How, under those circumstances, could you tell the public: "And now we're going to negotiate a halt along the line of contact"?

But by the end of 2022, the situation on the battlefield had begun to turn against us. Bakhmut fell in spring 2023, our counteroffensive was running out of steam, and by then Putin had no reason to stop. So in theory we could have tried to reach an agreement in September or October 2022, but I'm convinced that nothing would have come of it anyway.

"Our grievance with our partners is the time we lost"

What did the US tell you, both publicly and privately, in 2022-2023? Supporting Ukraine was politically advantageous for the Biden administration, so why wasn't Ukraine given all the weapons it could possibly have received?

It ceased to be politically advantageous for the US president when diesel prices in America shot up in 2022. Things are very simple for Americans. Now we're cursing Trump because he won't let us strike Russian oil refineries.

With all due respect to the Biden administration – they genuinely did a lot for us, and we should be grateful – they didn't let us strike oil refineries either. They said exactly the same thing: "You understand, we're facing certain difficulties here…"

But Ukraine wasn't striking oil refineries at the time…

And wasn't it the Biden administration that came up with the ingenious mechanism of not imposing sanctions on Russian oil but introducing a price cap instead? Ukrainians need to understand that for any US president, whoever it is and whatever party they belong to, the price of diesel is a fundamental issue in domestic politics. Energy stability will always play a key role in how they think and formulate policy.

There's a myth in Ukraine that a long war is in the interests of the Americans and Europeans, that they are fighting Russia through us. The Russians are fuelling this narrative. I assure you that if the Americans and Europeans could have stopped the war in 2022, they would have done so, crossed themselves and said: "Let's now do everything we can to make sure this never happens again."

In autumn 2022, [General Mark] Milley said the war had reached a stalemate. [Valerii] Zaluzhnyi later said the same. Milley wasn't a minor figure; he knew what he was talking about. Some people in America criticised him, but by and large, everyone understood.

By the end of 2022, the Americans had started coming to us and asking: "What happens next?" Our side was talking about a "major decisive counteroffensive" – a battle that would settle everything. Everyone was scratching their heads, but they couldn't say no to Ukraine.

From 1 January 2023 onwards, Zelenskyy began speaking to European leaders and the US. There was a flood of announcements about weapons deliveries. Not in spring 2022, as the Russians claim, but only in January 2023. The preparation of brigades, the assault brigades – the whole process began.

Our partners said: "Ukraine, do you want a decisive battle? We won't abandon you. We'll help you fight it." Unfortunately, when the counteroffensive didn't end as expected, our partners were already asking openly behind the scenes: "When are the negotiations?" But by then Putin no longer needed them.

So can we conclude that in fact there was never a window of opportunity when both sides were ready to reach an agreement, but that everything ground to a halt after third parties intervened?

No, there wasn't. The public will always look for someone to blame: why did this happen? That's understandable, especially when life in Ukraine is genuinely very hard for us.

But objectively, looking back, I can't see a single moment when Putin would have been willing to stop the war.

How do you assess the risk of a Russian attack on Europe? How likely is an attack on the Baltic states?

There's a saying that generals are always prepared to fight the last war. I don't think Russian tanks are going to cross the Estonian border at Narva and occupy everywhere. An invasion doesn't necessarily look like a convoy of Russian tanks crossing the border and pulling down a border post.

Putin's objective in a war with Europe would not be direct territorial conquest, but 24 hours of hesitation in Brussels. If the collective security mechanisms in either the EU or NATO fail to kick in within 24 hours, every country will call him individually and say: "Let's negotiate. What do you want?" That's it.

"One player was given preferential treatment: the head of the President's Office"

In December 2023, according to opinion polls conducted by several research centres, you were one of the three politicians most trusted by the public. The other two were Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vitalii Kim. Was this the beginning of your falling-out with the President's Office which eventually led to your resignation as foreign minister?

In a country where there is no politics, approval ratings shouldn't get anyone worked up. Today people carry you on their shoulders; tomorrow they drag your name through the mud. That's how our society works.

The real problem lay elsewhere: a balance was never struck between all the players involved in foreign policy. The president spent a long time trying to balance the roles of Dmytro Kuleba, Andrii Yermak and other people.

There were about ten people in the country who saw themselves as top negotiators or foreign ministers, even though they held different positions. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie, which is normal. The president kept on trying to maintain the balance, until eventually he got tired. In August or September 2024, he asked me to step down.

The system in which all the players were balanced around a single goal simply didn't work, to put it mildly. One player was given preferential treatment – the head of the President's Office. He was told: "'It's all yours now. You take care of it." Everyone else fell in line behind him. It's like football: the coach has one vision for the game plan, and someone else has another.

They told me: "That's it." I shook hands, thanked them for working with me, and left. Incidentally, relations were enjoying an Indian summer in 2024, around the time of the peace summit in Switzerland. We were genuinely working as one team, and everything was going well. But that was just one episode in a much bigger picture: the problem of the lack of balance in foreign policy."

What exactly did you do to get on the wrong side of Yermak?

One day, when you interview Andrii Borysovych, you can ask him. He'll tell you his version of all these events.

On what issues did your views differ?

On the substance of foreign policy, there were no fundamental disagreements between me and President Zelenskyy or Andrii Yermak. I did have a somewhat different view on Belarus, but those were working-level issues. Only history will judge who was right.

I believed that [Belarusian leader Alexander] Lukashenko never does anything good for Ukraine and that he wouldn't refrain from doing something bad simply because we asked him to or treated him positively. Another group of people took the view: "We're on friendly terms with him. We'll hold secret talks, sit down together, and thanks to that a second front won't open in the north."

Again, only history will judge who was right.

In September 2024, after you'd resigned, you were offered the post of Ukraine's ambassador to the US, replacing Oksana Markarova. Why didn't you accept?

I consider appointments to any position within the president's chain of command to be a private matter for the president: what he offers to whom and what response he gets. Why comment on it if things ultimately didn't work out?

Even before I resigned, I'd decided that I would stay in Ukraine afterwards.

Would you accept the post now?

As I said, my position is that I want to live in Ukraine.

I think it will be genuinely difficult for the president to find someone for this post, because it's not just about professional skills. It's also about being part of a team and accepting a particular role within it.

Most likely, it will have to be a politician in the mould of the Trump administration rather than a career diplomat. But if it is a career diplomat, they'll need to be extremely flexible in their views on everything: both the relationships within the Ukrainian team and relations with the US.

And above all it will have to be someone who understands that, most likely, they will ultimately bear the burden of responsibility for everything that goes wrong during their tenure as ambassador to the US during Donald Trump's presidency.

Tetiana Danylenko

Translated by Tetiana Buchkovska, Solomiia Shvak and Anatolii Tereshchenkov

Edited by Teresa Pearce