David Arachamija learned what war was when he was a teenager.

By the time he was 13, his family was among some 250,000 Georgians who were forced to leave Abkhazia during the fighting in 1992-1993 – the region of Georgia that Russia declared “independent State” recognized.

Like many other Georgians from Abkhazia, his family ended up in Ukraine.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

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His path into politics also began with the war: in March 2014, Arakhamiya, now a successful entrepreneur, founded an organization that collected money to buy equipment for the 79th Airborne Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The unit from Mykolayiv in southern Ukraine, where Arakhamiya grew up, was on the land connection between the peninsula and the Ukrainian mainland during the Russian annexation of Crimea.

When war broke out in Donbass in the summer of 2014, she was involved in some of the heaviest fighting.

On Monday, Arakhamiya headed Ukrainian negotiators who traveled to Belarus to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia.

He is the leader of the parliamentary group of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party.

The composition of the Ukrainian delegation shows two things: how serious the Ukrainian leadership is about the talks - and how far removed from reality is the constantly repeated assertion by the Russian leadership that Nazis ruled Ukraine and bloodily suppressed everything that was not purebred be ukrainian

Selenskyj sees little chance of success

When the talks were announced on Sunday, Zelenskyy said he didn't see any great prospects of success.

But an attempt must be made "so that not a single citizen of Ukraine has the slightest doubt that I, as President, tried to stop the war when there was even the slightest chance of doing so".

Some of Zelenskyy's closest associates made a trip to Belarus, which, given Russian President Vladimir Putin's statements to the Ukrainian leadership, was risky not only because of the fighting in Ukraine.

In a statement issued by the Russian Defense Ministry on Monday afternoon, the Ukrainian leadership condemned the issue of arms to the people of Kiev as “criminal”.

According to Zelenskyj, Lukashenko had assured that during the talks no rockets would be launched from Belarusian territory and no planes or helicopters would take off for operations against Ukraine.

The Ukrainians took a detour via Poland, because on the direct route from Kyiv to the place of the negotiations on the Pripyat River in the Belarusian-Ukrainian border area they would have had to go straight through the front lines.

According to Ukrainian information, while they were still on the move, military planes took off from Belarusian airports in the direction of Ukraine, contrary to Lukashenko's promise.

In addition to Reznikov and the Georgian Arakhamiya, who only has a Ukrainian passport since 2015, the most important member of the Ukrainian delegation was the presidential adviser Mikhail Podoliak.

Although he was born near Lviv in western Ukraine in 1972, he lived in Belarus from the late 1980s, where he worked as a journalist for Russian-language newspapers, until he was deported to Ukraine in 2004 for writing articles critical of Alexandr Lukashenko's regime .

Podoliak is one of those men from Zelenskyy's vicinity who have regularly reported on developments in front of the camera since the Russian attack on Thursday morning.