In an interview with FRANCE 24's Gulliver Cragg in Kyiv, the head of the parliamentary faction of President Volodymyr Zelensky's Servant of the People party discussed the situation in Ukraine, one year after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. David Arakhamia said Russian President Vladimir Putin had "lost influence in the world" as a result of Moscow's military setbacks in Ukraine. Arakhamia said "everyone" should worry after Putin said he would suspend his country's participation in New START, the last remaining major nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia.
Arakhamia, a close associate of Zelensky, was part of a Ukrainian delegation involved in fruitless peace negotiations with Russia in the early weeks of the conflict. He said that what Moscow then presented as a "peace agreement" was actually an unfeasible "capitulation", based on the belief that Ukrainians "would be weak".
Arakhamia explained that Ukraine exited the negotiations after the Bucha massacre of civilians, the first evidence of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. The Russian negotiators "tried to persuade me that the Bucha operation was a joint fake operation by British special forces and Ukrainians," Arakhamia said.
