Ukraine, Russia appear set to engage in Istanbul-hosted talks without Zelenskyy, Putin
Ukrainian president calls Russian group led by presidential adviser and deputy ministers 'decorative'
Russia's Vladimir Putin spurned a challenge to meet face-to-face with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Turkey on Thursday, instead sending a second-tier delegation to planned peace talks, while the Ukrainian president said his defence minister would head up Kyiv's team.
They will be the first direct talks between the sides since March 2022, but hopes of a major breakthrough were further dented by U.S. President Donald Trump who said there would be no movement without a meeting between himself and Putin.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later echoed that view, telling reporters in the Turkish resort of Antalya that Washington "didn't have high expectations" for the Ukraine talks in Istanbul.
The head of the Russian delegation, presidential adviser Vladimir Medinsky, said he expected Ukraine's representatives to turn up for the beginning of discussions on Friday in Istanbul at 10 a.m. local time.
"We are ready to work," Medinsky said in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app. He said his delegation had held "productive" talks on Thursday evening with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.
Zelenskyy said Putin's decision not to attend but to send what he called a "decorative" line-up showed the Russian leader was not serious about ending the war. Russia accused Ukraine of trying "to put on a show" around the talks.
"We can't be running around the world looking for Putin," Zelenskyy said after meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.
"I feel disrespect from Russia. No meeting time, no agenda, no high-level delegation — this is personal disrespect. To Erdogan, to Trump," Zelenskyy told reporters.
Zelenskyy said he himself would also not now go to Istanbul and that his team's mandate was to discuss a ceasefire.
A decree issued by Zelenskiy said Ukraine's delegation would be led by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov and include the deputy heads of its intelligence services, the deputy chief of the military's general staff and the deputy foreign minister.
Ukraine wants ceasefire
Ukraine backs an immediate, unconditional 30-day ceasefire but Putin has said he first wants to start talks at which the details of such a truce could be discussed. More than three years after its full-scale invasion, Russia has the advantage on the battlefield and says Ukraine could use a pause in the war to call up extra troops and acquire more Western weapons.
Both Trump and Putin have said for months they are keen to meet each other, but no date has been set. Trump, after piling heavy pressure on Ukraine and clashing with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, has lately expressed growing impatience that Putin may be "tapping me along."
"Nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Rubio, speaking in Antalya, later echoed that thought: "It's my assessment that I don't think we're going to have a breakthrough here until the President [Trump] and President Putin interact directly on this topic."
Referring to the current state of the talks as a "logjam," Rubio said he would travel to Istanbul to meet with Turkey's foreign minister and with Ukraine's delegation on Friday.
William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, believes that Putin's behaviour — including his absence from the meetings in Turkey — is causing frustration with Trump and other U.S. officials.
"He's holding up the show, he's not moving in the direction that President Trump would like him to move," he told NBC News.
Ongoing unpredictability
The diplomatic disarray was symptomatic of the deep hostility between the warring sides and the unpredictability injected by Trump, whose interventions since returning to the White House in January have often provoked dismay from Ukraine and its European allies.
While Zelenskyy waited in vain for Putin in Ankara, the Russian negotiating team sat in Istanbul with no one to talk to on the Ukrainian side. Some 200 reporters milled around near the Dolmabahce Palace on the Bosphorus that the Russians had specified as the talks venue.
The enemies have been wrestling for months over the logistics of ceasefires and peace talks while trying to show Trump they are serious about trying to end what he calls "this stupid war."
Yet some observers question if Trump can truly achieve bringing about an end to the conflict.
"The fundamental theory of Donald Trump that he can somehow impose a solution on a war between Russia and Ukraine has just never been the case," Ben Rhodes, a former national security adviser to former U.S. president Barack Obama, told MSNBC.
"Because Russia and Ukraine have very different views of the war that they're fighting and what the outcome should be."
'Putin doesn't want a deal'
Brian Taylor, the director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at New York state's Syracuse University, sounded a similar note on the distance between the warring parties.
"The root problem here it that Putin doesn't want a deal, he wants victory, which to him means the subjugation of Ukraine," he told CBS News. "And the Ukrainians and President Zelenskyy want to maintain their independence and have some guarantees about their security going forward."
Hundreds of thousands have been killed and wounded on both sides in the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Washington has threatened repeatedly to abandon its mediation efforts unless there is clear progress.
Asked if Putin would join talks at some future point, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "What kind of participation will be required further, at what level, it is too early to say now."
Russia said on Thursday its forces had captured two more settlements in Ukraine's Donetsk region. A spokeswoman for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointedly reminded reporters of his comment last year that Ukraine was "getting smaller" in the absence of an agreement to stop fighting.
Once they start, the talks will have to address a chasm between the two sides over a host of issues.
Russian delegation head Medinsky, a former culture minister who has overseen the rewriting of history textbooks to reflect Moscow's narrative on the war. The wider Russian team includes a deputy defence minister, a deputy foreign minister and the head of military intelligence.
Key members of the team, including its leader, were also involved in the last direct peace talks in Istanbul in March 2022 — and Medinsky confirmed on Thursday that Russia saw the new talks as a resumption of those interrupted three years ago.
"The task of direct negotiations with the Ukrainian side is, sooner or later, to achieve long-term peace by eliminating the basic root causes of the conflict," said Medinsky.
The terms under discussion in 2022, when Ukraine was still reeling from Russia's initial invasion, would be deeply disadvantageous to Kyiv. They included a demand by Moscow for deep cuts to the size of Ukraine's military.
With Russian forces now in control of close to a fifth of Ukraine, Putin has held fast to his longstanding demands for Kyiv to cede territory, abandon its NATO membership ambitions and become a neutral country.
Ukraine rejects these terms as tantamount to capitulation, and is seeking guarantees of its future security from world powers, especially the United States.
With files from CBC News