« on: May 14, 2025, 07:28:41 pm »
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-and-russia-cant-even-agree-on-who-will-meet-where-for-peace-talks-d28c2f92Ignoring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call to meet for direct high-level talks in Turkey, Russian leader Vladimir Putin dispatched to Istanbul a team of junior officials, making it uncertain that negotiations between the warring nations would occur at all.
The Russian team is set to be led by Putin’s aide Vladimir Medinsky and deputy defense minister Alexander Fomin, the same men whom Putin dispatched to negotiate Ukraine’s surrender in the early days of the war. The last session of these talks occurred in Istanbul in March 2022, and the negotiations fell apart as Russia suffered a military defeat and withdrew its forces from Kyiv and other parts of northern Ukraine.
Zelensky, who is slated to arrive in Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday for separate talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said he would be ready to meet with Putin if the Russian leader also came to Turkey. President Trump, who has made ending the war in Ukraine his key foreign-policy priority, has also indicated he might have attended.
But Putin’s decision to send junior officials instead foreclosed the possibility of any breakthrough, Western diplomats say. By naming Medinsky, a former culture minister, as head of the delegation, they say, Putin has indicated that he’s unwilling to budge and seeks the same objectives as in 2022: the end of Ukraine as a sovereign state that is able to defend itself.
Senior U.S. officials are also headed to Istanbul, though it isn’t clear whom they would meet and when.
EXCERPT
Putin chickened out from his own meeting...
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