According to Kuleba, there is no consensus among experts and politicians regarding the timing of this decision.
“I have a personal answer to this question. But I want to say right away that I talked about this with everyone I could, abroad, and opinions vary… In my opinion, this happened in the spring of 2020. But there is a version that this happened in the fall of 2020,” he noted.
At the same time, he emphasized that already in the spring of 2021, the concentration of Russian troops near the Ukrainian borders was part of preparations for the invasion, which means that planning began much earlier.
He also suggested that one of the factors that could influence the Kremlin’s decision was the political situation after the negotiations in the Normandy format in 2019, when the Russian side could conclude that it was impossible to achieve its goals through political means.
“When exactly will he [Путин] I realized that you can’t make porridge with Zelensky, that Zelensky refuses to accept ORDLO (certain areas of Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine, occupied by the Russian Federation. – “GORDON”) on Russian terms,” Kuleba noted.
At the same time, the ex-minister emphasized that even hypothetical concessions from Ukraine regarding Donbass would not guarantee peace, but could, in his opinion, lead to internal destabilization.
“Even if we took ORDLO on Russian terms, if only there was no war, such a brawl would have broken out in the country that there would have been a high risk of civil war. And it would have been much worse,” he said.
Kuleba noted that in history there are examples when other countries agreed to complex compromises or even the loss of part of their interests in order to return or gain territories, but Ukraine, in his assessment, was not ready for such a scenario at that time – “neither in terms of the attitude of the elite, nor in terms of the attitude of society.”
Context
The Russian Federation launched a war against Ukraine in 2014, when it occupied Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine from the northern, eastern and southern directions. In the spring of the same year, the Ukrainian army deoccupied the north of the country, and in the fall – parts of the Kharkov and Kherson regions, in particular Kherson.
In February 2026, The Guardian wrote that in late October 2021, the CIA and MI6 provided Ukraine with intelligence warning that Russia was preparing for a full-scale invasion, and subsequently American and British officials insisted during visits to Kyiv that the threat was real and needed to be prepared for.
Kuleba himself said that in the fall of 2021, during a visit to Washington, the United States warned the Ukrainian delegation about the risk of a full-scale Russian invasion, but without details about the sources of this assessment. According to him, a separate conversation took place with Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who directly warned about a possible war, saying that Ukraine should prepare to “dig trenches.”
