The uninvited guest: Boris Johnson's spring journey to Kyiv and world peace

Gaslighting us into forgetting what we know about peacemaking and accountability

Uninvited Guests, Walter Dendy Sadler (1854-1923)

In spring 2022, Boris Johnson, then still prime minister, rushed to Kyiv to tell president Zelensky not to accept a peace deal Ukraine and Russia had just negotiated in Istanbul. So far, so uncontroversial, or at least it should be. It has been reported by a number of credible, on-the-record sources, most recently Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of president Zelensky’s Servant of the People party and one of his closest advisors, who was one of the negotiators of the Istanbul document.

Some day, Johnson himself may confirm what he told the Ukrainians during that surprise visit, though given that he is a notoriously prolific, baroque and self-serving liar, there will be no need to give more weight to his recollections than to those of more reliable witnesses.

This story and the controversy around it aren’t going away. Following its latest iteration, the interview with Arakhamiia, people once again get attacked for no more than reporting on it, shouted down, accused of being Russian shills. From the other end of the spectrum, there is fairly unconvincing mourning for the peace that surely would have been had Johnson not pulled his perfidious Albion move.

This manufactured controversy isn’t about what Boris Johnson told the Ukrainians or what it would have taken to make peace then or now. It is a contest over who can best gaslight us into denying what we know to be true. I’ve been wanting to say this for a while, but also kept thinking that it shouldn’t need saying since it’s so completely obvious, namely that both sides have it wrong:

·       those who demand that we treat the story as fake news, as verboten, who would censor all mention of these negotiations ever taking place or of Western governments playing a problematic role in Ukraine’s war, and peace, efforts.

·       those who insist that Boris Johnson single-handedly killed a shiny, sturdy, ready-to-go peace agreement that would have halted the war then and there and forevermore.

Between those two ends of the spectrum, mired in their respective absurdities, is a gaping hole where the accurate, obvious take-away should be: that peace talks and deals fail more often than they succeed. They are tender shoots, which can wither and be crushed for all too many reasons and no reason at all, i.e. indifference. And that therefore, the duty of any moral, responsible leader is to lean in and do everything in his/her power to enable the little shoot to grow stronger. At the very least, not to stomp on it.

We know this. The pundits and political leaders who take it upon themselves to explain the world to us know this. They know it because they have been there and done that, mediated a conflict, reported from a peace conference, written a dissertation about comparative negotiation strategies.

Not that it takes a PhD in international relations, an endowed chair in conflict studies, a syndicated column in a major paper to know this. Anyone who follows the news knows that at any given time there are multiple peace processes ongoing around the world, and that we hear more often of their breaking down than of their lasting success.

Like the Minsk Group, the OSCE-based mechanism running for almost 30 years, to mediate the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, ending in full-blown war followed by ethnic cleansing. Or the Minsk Accords, I and II, supposed to settle the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but conceived and implemented with such bad faith that they led up to Europe’s greatest war in generations. Nine rounds of talks between the Taliban and the US in Doha, not particularly fruitful and finally upended by the latter’s chaotic withdrawal. UN-sponsored talks between the Syrian government and the opposition in Geneva, then competing talks sponsored by Russia and hosted in Astana, Kazakhstan, and yet there is still war in Syria today.

And, of course, decades of (mostly stalled) peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, with political investment from the highest level, talks hosted in a succession of Western capitals, consuming the intellectual labors of generations of diplomats and thinkers and the activist energies of thousands, inspiring moments of global hope – and yet, here we are, in the middle of the bloodiest war since the outlines of this conflict were first drawn generations ago.

Even when a peace process eventually results in peace, this typically comes after years and decades of failing, again and again, causing despair and crushing hopes, but yet somehow reviving again and again, because the alternative - endless war - is really no alternative at all. Think Northern Ireland, with its long list of ceasefires that didn’t hold. Or the former Yugoslavia when it was still just called “Yugoslavia”, during those anguishing years of European and American envoys shuttling between warring parties that wouldn’t stop the warring.

It is a truism that making peace is hard. Early in the conflict, it’s tempting to think that continuing to fight can bring outright victory or at least improve your bargaining position. Later on, after unbearable sacrifices have been made and unimaginable suffering endured, the thought of just giving up, of letting the other guys get away, has become unpalatable.

Peacemaking is technically difficult, like a Rubik’s cube or juggling burning torches. The contested issues can be too irreconcilable to overcome, even with the greatest patience, generosity and creativity. Good peacemaking should be comprehensive, checking all the boxes from human rights to transitional justice, from addressing grievances to reconciliation, from economic recovery to building back better, plus the demands of inclusivenes and trauma-informed approaches. Try to do it all at once and it becomes too much. Go lean and mean to get the main job done, and peace might be undone by all the unmet needs.

Peacemaking can exact a steep political price from those negotiating on behalf their communities. Being the approval-craving politicians they typically are, they’d much rather walk away in faux disgust at sitting at a table with their vile opponents than risk losing the public’s adoration over inevitable, but unheroic compromises. Peacemaking cost Yitzhak Rabin his life. It takes nerves of steel at a time of heightened emotions, uncertainty and competing demands. All this assuming that the political will to make peace is even there.

Once the tender shoot of a conditional agreement has emerged despite the odds, it is impossibly fragile: too much sun, too much wind, too much water or too little of it, toxic or depleted soil can all kill it, or it can simply be crushed. Maybe not all the key stakeholders were at the table and their concerns were overlooked or they’re just offended. Maybe they were at the table, but when they took the draft back to their constituents it turned out they were not on board after all. Maybe the regional or global environment is so mired in camp-thinking, so riven with violent conflicts and the flows of arms and armed men they engender, that it will keep inflaming violence instead of exerting a calming influence. There will be spoilers, on the inside and outside of the process, actors that benefit (often in the most opportunistic, cynical manner) from sabotaging any agreement.

Or the deal itself is plausible enough, but third parties fail to make the indispensable political, technical and material investments to render it viable. This is where we return to Boris Johnson and what he is, and isn’t, responsible for.

The March 2022 Istanbul agreement could have failed for a thousand reasons, and it probably would have. It had everything going against it, except for common sense and the lives of hundreds of thousands who are dead now and the lost happiness of the millions who mourn them. It had been hastily negotiated, without much technical support by third parties. Key stakeholders who would ensure a sturdy, workable, people-centered peace had not been at the table. Powerful Western countries had shown the process a conspicuously cold shoulder. We can imagine plenty of spoilers lurking on both sides, even if they never got around to their spoiling because the deal was abandoned so soon. The revelation of atrocities committed in Bucha or another such event could have made the deal too hard to swallow for Ukrainians. The global context, with the cracks of the new multipolar order tearing open and deepening, was probably too harsh for this tender shoot to thrive.

Yet even so, Boris Johnson, who as a powerful nation’s PM had taken responsibility for global security upon himself, remains accountable for his actions. When a tender shoot of a peace agreement, a fragile chance to end a war, pokes its little green head through the soil, it is incumbent on our leaders to do everything in their power to enable this tiny plant to survive, grow, strengthen, straighten, throw down deep roots and eventually bear fruit. Everyone in a position of power at that moment should have paused whatever they were doing, lauded and encouraged the Ukrainian and Russian negotiators, thanked the Turkish mediators, offered to send their best people and pledge generous funding to support the process, reimagined their own foreign and security policies to render the deal feasible, and created spaces and resources for fleshing out what was still only a meager, threadbare agreement.

The collective international community, including and especially Ukraine’s Western partners, should have thrown their weight behind this process, in good faith. If they had done so, this tender shoot might just have made it. And even if it hadn’t, the shifts it would have loosened, towards diplomacy and creative political thinking, would have put us on a different, more constructive trajectory. Ukraine and Ukrainians might have been spared a lot and be well on their way to recovery by now. At this fork in the road in March and April 2022, many other futures were possible and most would have been better than the one that ensued and which we inhabit now.

Instead, everyone (the West anyway, in conspicuous lockstep) did nothing of the sort. They showed a collective cold shoulder. Except for Boris Johnson, who went above and beyond by showing up uninvited in Kyiv and telling Ukraine’s leaders one or more of the following, depending on the reporting: that Ukraine should keep fighting, that Russia should be bled some more, that the UK would not sign on to any of the security guarantees envisioned in the Istanbul document.

Johnson isn’t responsible for this peace deal falling apart. Write him out of the story, and it still had barely any chance. But he is accountable for his unsolicited, enthusiastic sabotaging of it, for doing the opposite of what a statesman’s moral and political duty demanded. Since he likely won’t stand for election again, British voters cannot hold him accountable for this failing (and his many others). For what it’s worth, he may be held accountable by historians. He knew that the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands were at stake. For not showing them any concern, he may face his maker (if you believe in this sort of thing).

Although from everything we know about Johnson (apparently far from all there is to know, since, remarkably, it doesn’t include the number of children he has fathered), he will probably end up facing the other guy.