“I do not think it is our place to pass judgement on Zelenskyy’s letter to Putin, but what I can say is this: we wholeheartedly wish to see this war end, because every single day of it means additional suffering for the Ukrainian people,” said the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, in remarks to journalists.

Papuashvili argued that every available opportunity should have been seized to bring about peace.

“From the very first day, we said that every available opportunity must be used to establish peace. Regrettably, we have not seen that approach from certain European countries. On the contrary, we have watched them actively encourage the continuation of this conflict. Let me remind you: within two months of this war beginning, a peace agreement had been initialled in Istanbul by the heads of both the Ukrainian and Russian delegations. The Ukrainian delegation was led by Davit Arakhamia, who stated publicly that the document was acceptable to Ukraine, but when they returned to Kyiv, the British Prime Minister arrived and torpedoed it.

The Ukrainian authorities were told: no agreement, keep fighting.
Since then, Ukraine has been at war for four years. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, goes about his life quite peacefully, hosting conferences and attending seminars. Sadly, Western countries displayed this same reckless disregard for another nation’s fate even before the war began.

These are the very parties who bear responsibility for global security, the EU and NATO, and they were unable to stop this conflict. This war could have been prevented. The new American administration acknowledges as much: that this war was avoidable, something the EU, NATO, and the Western world of the time failed to achieve. And this war could have been ended at the very outset, as Ukraine’s own leadership has since confirmed. Arakhamia has stated that a message was brought to Kyiv, through Boris Johnson, that this war was not to be ended. Today, we see that it continues. In the meantime, four years have passed, and hundreds of people, soldiers and civilians alike, are dying,” Shalva Papuashvili stressed.

The Speaker added that, regrettably, there is no end in sight to the war, and that any initiative capable of bringing it to a close is of vital importance.

“Ukraine’s own leadership has stated that the terms currently under discussion are worse than those contained in the draft Istanbul agreement of April 2022, the very agreement that Boris Johnson’s visit destroyed, as confirmed by Arakhamia himself,” Papuashvili said.

For context, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which he wrote: “Do not be afraid to step out of this war; that is precisely what is needed from you now. We are offering to end the war. Let us set a concrete date for our meeting.”