Time for peace in Ukraine – analysts to Salon — RT World News

Washington and some of its NATO allies have prolonged the Russia-Ukraine conflict by rejecting diplomacy, leading to more bloodshed and increasing the risk of full-scale war between the nuclear-armed superpowers, according to an editorial published by the US magazine Salon.

“While the Ukrainians and Russians fight and die in this war of attrition, by more than… Half a million He added that it was the United States and some of its Western allies who stood in the way of the peace talks. Salon contributors Medea Benjamin and Nicholas JS Davies books In an article published on Sunday. “This was true of talks between Russia and Ukraine that took place in March 2022, one month after the Russian invasion, and is also true of the talks Russia tried to launch with the United States in January 2024.”

The editorial said that the initial peace agreement negotiated by Russian and Ukrainian officials in March 2022 should have ended the conflict by declaring Kiev militarily neutral, like Austria or Switzerland. Territorial disputes over Crimea and the breakaway republics of Donbas, which voted to join Russia, could have been resolved by the residents of those regions in new elections.

The opinion article stated that American and British officials intervened to persuade Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to engage in a long-term conflict with Russia to regain lost territory in Kiev. “The American and British leaders never admitted to their people what they had done; “They did not try to explain why they did it.”

Benjamin and Davis argued that US sabotage of peace talks followed a predictable pattern in Washington foreign policy: lying about decisions in crisis situations and moving to the next flashpoint—in this case, the war between Israel and Hamas—before such moves became widely known. , and by that time it becomes irreversible. The United States and other prominent NATO members were “Emboldened, or perhaps deceived, by the limited successes at various times in prolonging and continually escalating the war and rejecting diplomacy, despite the ever-increasing horrific human costs to the people of Ukraine.”

The opinion article reported that the administration of US President Joe Biden rejected a Russian proposal for peace talks earlier this year, even as battlefield conditions for Ukraine deteriorated. Benjamin and Davis added that US policy in Ukraine depends on a gradual escalation into a full-scale conflict with Russia. “This is inevitably overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war. This has not changed for two years, and it will not change unless our leaders take a dramatically different approach. It will require serious diplomacy to end the war on terms that Russia and Ukraine can agree to, as they did in the March 2022 neutrality agreement.” .

Salon, which debuted in 1995 as one of the first all-digital media outlets, claims to reach an audience of about 10 million readers.