That is not what Bennett said. Rather, he placed the blame on the revelations of the Bucha atrocities:“The Bucha massacre—once that happened I said, it’s over.” Even after Johnson's April 9 visit, Zelensky issued a statement on April 16 that he was open to a negotiated settlement with Russia. It was Putin who on April 11 declared that the peace talks were at a dead end.
Furthermore, Putin's chief envoy to Ukraine, Dmitry Kozak, has reported that before the invasion he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv for Ukraine to stay out of NATO, but that Putin rejected it because he had expanded his objectives to include annexing large parts of Ukraine.
So the story that there was a negotiated peace deal that was scuttled because of Boris Johnson's intervention is pure myth and Russian propaganda. This war is continuing because Putin wants it to continue, not because of any dark forces in the west.
The truth since day 1-
the war will end when Putin chooses to end it or the world is flooded with oil.
That is the heart of all the false equivalence.
The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago
According to Bennett, as early as the second Saturday of the war, or a little less than a week and a half into the war, both Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin made major concessions: Putin, by giving up on the goals of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and its “denazification” — meaning, as Bennett interpreted it, regime change — and Zelensky by giving up on pursuing NATO membership.
Calling both leaders “pragmatic,” Bennett says that over the course of negotiations, he “was under the impression that both sides very much want[ed] a ceasefire” and gave the odds of any deal holding at 50-50. Over a “marathon of drafts,” he claims, seventeen draft agreements were prepared. But “they blocked it, and I thought [they were] wrong,” Bennett says, referring to the Western powers backing Ukraine.
“I have one claim,” Bennett told the interviewer. “I claim there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire.” When the interviewer asks if he means “had they not curbed it,” he replies with a nod.