Did Boris Johnson Block Ukraine’s Peace Deal? What Really Happened in April 2022

Johnson's account of the meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 9, 2022 tells a different story.

He said he did not tell Zelensky to stop negotiating. Nor, he said, could any Western leader make that decision for Ukraine.

“I cannot be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians themselves,” Johnson recalled telling Zelensky. If Ukraine wanted to keep fighting, he said, Britain would support it.

That distinction is important because the negotiations with Russia were still far from producing a final agreement when Johnson arrived in Kyiv.

The Istanbul talks were never a peace deal

Ukraine and Russia began talking almost immediately after the full-scale invasion. The first meetings were held in Belarus in late February 2022. By March, the sides were discussing possible terms that included Ukrainian neutrality, no NATO membership and limits on Ukraine's armed forces.

The March 29 meeting in Istanbul was more significant. Ukraine presented a framework under which it could accept permanent neutrality in exchange for strong international security guarantees. The countries proposed as guarantors included Britain, the United States, France, Turkey and Germany. Ukraine would also retain the possibility of joining the EU.

But there was no signed peace agreement.

There was not even a final document that both sides had accepted.

The talks continued after Johnson's visit. On April 15, Russia submitted another 17-page draft. One of its most serious demands concerned the proposed security guarantees.

Moscow wanted the ability to block a military response by the guarantor states if Ukraine were attacked again.

That would have left Russia with a say over whether Ukraine could receive military help after a future attack. For Kyiv, that went to the core of the proposed agreement: whether the guarantees would actually protect the country.

The negotiations produced more than 15 draft versions but eventually stalled and ended by August.

The timeline makes the idea of Johnson simply “stopping” a completed peace deal difficult to reconcile with what was actually being negotiated.

Bucha changed the picture

There was another major development between the Istanbul talks and the later stages of negotiations.

As Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv region in early April, evidence of mass killings and other war crimes emerged in Bucha, Irpin and other parts of the region.

That changed the political atmosphere around the talks.

Ukraine was no longer negotiating with an abstract military opponent. It was doing so after the discovery of atrocities in areas recently occupied by Russian forces.

At the same time, the situation on the battlefield had changed. Russian troops had failed to take Kyiv and had withdrawn from the region.

Johnson arrived in the Ukrainian capital on April 9, shortly afterwards.

His government announced additional support, including up to $500mn in World Bank loan guarantees. The wider financial support package reached $1bn.

Johnson's message, according to his own account, was straightforward: Britain would back Ukraine if Ukrainians decided to continue fighting.

That was support for a Ukrainian decision, rather than a British order.

Britain and Germany were not thinking alike

Johnson's account also sheds light on a division inside Europe during the first weeks of the war.

He recalled speaking to a senior official in the office of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The official believed that a quick Ukrainian defeat might be preferable to a long war.

The argument was based on fear of a conflict that would become a disaster for Ukraine, Russia and the wider world.

Johnson said he considered that approach deeply wrong. In his view, Western governments had a responsibility to help Ukraine resist.

The difference was significant.

Some European governments initially focused on how to stop the war as quickly as possible and avoid a wider confrontation with Russia. Britain was moving towards a different position: helping Ukraine resist could be the best way to prevent Russia from imposing its terms by force.

The events around Kyiv strengthened the British argument. Russia had failed to achieve a quick victory, while Ukrainian forces had pushed its troops away from the capital.

The debate was therefore no longer simply about whether Ukraine should negotiate. It was about what kind of peace could follow a failed Russian attempt to defeat Ukraine militarily.

Why Russia keeps telling the same story

The Johnson narrative is politically useful for Moscow.

If Ukraine was ready to make peace and Britain stopped it, then Russia can present the continuation of the war as someone else's responsibility. The story also reduces Ukraine's role in its own decisions.

That is one reason the claim has survived for so long.

Moscow can use it to argue that Ukraine is not acting independently and that Western governments are preventing peace. The same argument can then be brought back whenever Russia demands that the West accept its terms.

This is particularly relevant in 2026, as Russian officials again refer to the “Istanbul principles” while pushing for conditions that would limit Ukraine's ability to defend itself.

The problem with that version of history is that it leaves out the most difficult parts of the negotiations.

There was no completed treaty. Russia continued to demand limits on Ukraine's military. Its April 15 draft sought a mechanism that could have allowed Moscow to block the security guarantees being offered to Kyiv. And the discovery of atrocities around Kyiv had fundamentally changed the Ukrainian government's room for manoeuvre.

Those facts do not prove that negotiations were impossible in every form. They do show that there was no finished peace agreement waiting for Johnson to approve or destroy.

Ukraine made the decision

The most important point in Johnson's account may be the least dramatic one.

Ukraine decided whether to keep fighting.

Britain could offer weapons, money and political support. It could advise Kyiv. But it could not make Ukrainian soldiers defend their country, and it could not erase what had happened in the towns around Kyiv.

That matters because the Russian version of the Istanbul story places the decisive choice in London. Johnson's account places it in Kyiv.

The difference is more than a dispute about one meeting in April 2022. It affects how the war itself is understood and, increasingly, how the terms of a future settlement are discussed.

If Istanbul was a nearly completed peace agreement destroyed by Britain, then Russia can claim that Western governments bear responsibility for the war continuing. If it was an unfinished negotiation undermined by fundamental disputes over security, Russia's military demands and the evidence of atrocities, the story is much harder to reduce to a single foreign intervention.

The April 15 draft is particularly difficult for the Kremlin's version to explain. A security guarantee that Russia could itself veto would have left the central problem of Ukraine's security unresolved.