re: Putin’s Invasion Had the Opposite Intended Effect - Russia Now Surrounded by NATO

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Here are three accounts of the April 2022 peacetalks status before the UK/US scuttled them. NATO was the primary concern according to EVERYONE. The thing speaks for itself.

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All sources show a similar Ukraine vision of a peace deal.

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(5) In exchange for giving up NATO, the EU Member States present among the guarantors (including Germany and France) guarantee Ukraine's assistance in joining the European Union.

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Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, opens new tab, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead with his military campaign, according to three people close to the Russian leadership.
The Ukrainian-born envoy, Dmitry Kozak, told Putin , opens new tabthat he believed the deal he had hammered out removed the need for Russia to pursue a large-scale occupation of Ukraine, opens new tab, according to these sources. Kozak's recommendation to Putin to adopt the deal is being reported by Reuters for the first time.
Putin had repeatedly asserted prior to the war that NATO and its military infrastructure were creeping closer to Russia's borders by accepting new members from eastern Europe, and that the alliance was now preparing to bring Ukraine into its orbit too. Putin publicly said that represented an existential threat to Russia, forcing him to react.
But, despite earlier backing the negotiations, Putin made it clear when presented with Kozak's deal that the concessions negotiated by his aide did not go far enough and that he had expanded his objectives to include annexing swathes of Ukrainian territory, the sources said. The upshot: the deal was dropped.

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