Putin bogs down Ukraine talks with impossible demands

MoscowExpectations were minimal and the results were practically nil. Vladimir Putin's envoys to the first talks between Russia and Ukraine In three years, they weren't coming to negotiate, but rather had the mission of buying time to continue the war without upsetting Donald Trump. Following the example of its president, the Russian delegation has buried the Ukrainian side's request for a ceasefire under unacceptable conditions. However, it has not been flatly refused.

According to several sources, the Kremlin envoys have demanded, as a condition for a truce, that the Ukrainian army withdraw from the parts of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions, annexed by Moscow to the Constitution, which the Russian army does not control. Furthermore, as sources present at the meeting explained to the journalist from The Economist Faced with the Kiev delegation's refusal to accept these demands, the Russian delegation threatened to annex two other provinces in addition to the four occupied ones: Sumi and Kharkiv. Russia also intends to create a security zone to guarantee the truce in the Sumi region, where Moscow's troops are conducting an offensive.

No official source from the Ukrainian government has confirmed this, but Foreign Ministry spokesman Georgi Tikhii made it clear that the Russian side had expressed "unacceptable things," without elaborating. Sources from the Ukrainian delegation have also lamented in various media outlets that the Kremlin emissaries' demands were "unrealistic" and "went far beyond" any previously discussed scenarios.

Speaking to Russian state television, Russia's chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, a passionate Russian history buff and one of the Kremlin's revisionist ideologues, rejected the ceasefire, attributing an apocryphal quote to Napoleon. "Those who say that first a truce is needed and then negotiations do not know history: war and negotiations always go hand in hand," he stated. According to him, during the talks he also reminded the Ukrainians of the missed opportunities they had missed by rejecting the 2022 Istanbul agreements. "History shows that when a party rejects reasonable compromises, it often ends up losing more," Medinski concluded.

However, good words

Despite the obvious disagreement, no one wants to be blamed for breaking up the fight in Trump's eyes. The number of prisoners, the largest since the start of the war, is expected to be handed over by both armies, who will hand over 1,000 enemy soldiers at a date yet to be announced. The Economist A source familiar with the talks, Medinski, said during the meeting: "We don't want war, but we are prepared to fight for a year, two, three, as long as it takes. We fought for Sweden for 21 years [between 1700 and 1721]. How long are you prepared to fight?"

Medinski added: "Perhaps some of you sitting at this table will lose more loved ones. Russia is prepared to fight forever." According to Carroll, it could be a barb at one of the members of the Ukrainian delegation, Serhii Kilsitsia, who confessed last year that his nephew had been killed in combat.

Ukraine's European allies have already described Russia's refusal to negotiate a ceasefire as "unacceptable." From Tirana, Albania, where European leaders met with Zelensky; French President Emmanuel Macron; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, along with the Ukrainian leader, have spoken by phone with Donald Trump to demand more pressure on Russia.

But Trump, despite having opened up to toughening sanctions on Russia If no results were achieved, he shows no signs of being disappointed with the contacts between Kiev and Moscow. On the contrary, the possibility of taking credit for having facilitated the talks could make him overlook the lack of progress and could spur him to continue mediation.

Another point that both sides have admitted to having discussed in the talks is the scheduling of a meeting between Putin and Zelensky, a possibility that Russia has dismissed by saying it would "take it into account." However, Trump, instead of forcing Putin to sit down with the Ukrainian leader, is playing into the Russian president's hands. This Thursday, he assured that the conflict in Ukraine would only be resolved with a meeting between him and the Kremlin leader, the scenario desired by the Kremlin, which ideally would only like to discuss the end of the war with the White House, without Ukraine.