Until January, Aleksey Arestovich was an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff. Photo: Alfredas Pliadis/Alamy
Trading a 20% stake Ukraine's territory for NATO membership for the rest of the country could be one way to end the war, suggested a former adviser to the President of Ukraine.
Controversial statements by Oleksiy Arestovich, which directly contradict the policy of the government of Ukraine, are unlikely to be popular among the public.
President Volodymyr Zelensky and other leading Ukrainian officials have ruled out a swap of territory for peace or NATO membership.
But Mr. Arestovich, who until January worked as an adviser to Zelensky's chief of staff, proposed the option of a «Federal Republic of Germany» as one of possible outcomes of the game.
Speaking in a YouTube interview with Russian journalist Yulia Latynina, Arestovich said the NATO membership debate has revealed deep contradictions between the goals of Ukraine and its main Western allies, suggesting four ways to overcome them.
He said that first of all, Ukraine must convince its Western allies to agree with his point of view. He suggested that Ukraine did not have enough «political resources» for this.
The second would be the option of a «Federal Republic of Germany», in which the free part of the effectively divided Ukraine was admitted to NATO in the hope that reunification would eventually be achieved peacefully.
«Let's say part of the occupied territory remains occupied, not controlled by the Ukrainian government. We cling to others. We don’t know exactly how many, but the vast majority,” he said.
“Let's say 80 percent of the territory that we own. In fact, most of us, most of the state, as they promised, ends the war and joins NATO. Many might call this a superhistoric opportunity.
“The third option is to find a compromise. But I think that the fourth option is the most probable — it’s the “march of justice two,” he said, referring to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner rebellion on June 24.
He said that the third option does not imply giving up ambition liberating Crimea and the occupied territories, but trying to do it peacefully.
The Ukrainian government has consistently stated that its military goals include the liberation of the entire occupied territory, including Crimea.
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Mr. Arestovich, a former psychologist and prolific blogger, is a well-known but controversial figure. in Ukraine.
In the first weeks of the war, he published a widely publicized briefing on the course of the conflict, at one point predicting that a peace deal was at hand and that the fighting would only last a few weeks or months.
< p>He resigned as an adviser to the presidential administration in January after he said that a Russian missile that destroyed a residential building in Dnipro was shot down by Ukrainian air defenses.
He currently does not hold an official post in the government, as did Mr. Zelensky. the office said he was only ever a freelance «adviser» to Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff, and not an employee.
The comments sparked backlash from Ukrainians, who accused him of spreading unverified information and supporting Russian propaganda narratives.
This is not the first time that the division of Germany after World War II has been used as a counterargument to the argument that Ukraine cannot join NATO while it has an active territorial dispute with Russia. .
The Federal Republic of Germany was created by the merger of the American, British and French zones of occupation in 1949.
It joined NATO in 1955, while the German Democratic Republic, based in the former Soviet zone of occupation, remained under Moscow's control. They reunited in 1991.
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