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Multiple countries, including Ukraine, have attempted to negotiate peace with Russia. Despite these agreements, Russia has consistently broken them.
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Conversations that shift blame to Ukraine for not negotiating again deflect from Russia’s unilateral role in its conflict with Ukraine. It also ignores Russia's false claims (see over 6,000 misleading stories about Ukraine) to justify its illegal conquest. Even the [embarrassing defeat](https://reliefweb.int/report/russian-federation/russia-begins-retreat-its-humiliation-grozny#:~:text=war reached a humiliating conclusion for the kremlin yesterday when the first russian army column withdrew from the chechen capital%2C grozny%2C under terms which%2C if implemented%2C effectively hand the city to the rebels.) in Chechnya in 1996 did not prevent Russia from leveling Chechen cities in 1999, and doing so dramatically increased Putin’s popularity in the lead-up to his 2000 election.
Claims that the US is “obstructing negotiations” are misleading and ignore that Ukraine does not currently wish to negotiate. To say that declining to negotiate is declining peace is to approach this conflict as if nothing existed before February 2022. The many past peace agreements Russia has broken cannot be ignored. Simply calling for peace without demonstrating how Ukraine would be protected if Russia were to violate another agreement is misleading.
<aside> <img src="/icons/map-pin_gray.svg" alt="/icons/map-pin_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Russia has committed nearly all the crimes it is committing in Ukraine before. This constitutes a pattern of behavior established over the past 20 years.
Russia repeatedly violated international law by orchestrating separatist movements and referendums at gun-point in Ukrainian territories, recognizing their “independence,” sending in its military, and attempting to annex them.
Assisting a rebel group in another nation would threaten the target country’s “territorial integrity.” The agreement says: “Every State has the duty to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in acts of civil strife or terrorist acts in another State or acquiescing in organized activities within its territory directed towards the commission of such acts.”
Russia signed the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation” in 1997. In the agreement, Russia promised “respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security.”
Russia has repeatedly violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum since the first violation in 2014. Under the Memorandum, Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arms in exchange for reassurances from Russia, among other countries, that its borders would be respected.
Russia repeatedly violated the Minsk agreements, and as researchers noted in 2017, “without Russian leadership, troops, financing, and weapons, there would be no war.”
<aside> đź’ˇ Russia can bring peace by going home at any time.
Ukrainians who decline to fight are likely to die. The mass graves in Russian-occupied regions like Bucha, Borodyanka, Lyman, Izyum, and Mariupol make clear that — intentionally or not — “peace” negotiations followed to their logical conclusion mean advocating for Ukraine to consent to genocide.
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More importantly, any negotiation that traded Ukrainian land would likely result in more large-scale war crimes against Ukrainians in those regions. Documented crimes include the rape, torture, and killing of men, women, and children, mutilation, starvation, grotesque scenes like human heads on spikes, torture cellars, and potentially well over 500,000 stolen Ukrainian children who have disappeared into the Russian Federation.