A top Ukrainian official has newly confirmed that the war could have ended – and tens of thousands of lives could have been saved – had Ukraine and its NATO allies accepted a peace deal with Moscow weeks after the February 2022 invasion.

Davyd Arakhamia is the parliamentary leader of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, and head of the Ukrainian delegation at the spring 2022 peace talks held in Istanbul. In an interview last month, Arakhamia acknowledged that the Russians “were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” For Moscow, he added, Ukrainian neutrality was “the key point” and “the biggest thing for them.”