Half the world was watching Vladimir Putin and the Russian president waited until the last minute to confirm what everyone suspected: that he will not be in Istanbul this Thursday to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, just as the Ukrainian president had proposedPutin doesn't consider Zelensky a valid interlocutor and proposed direct negotiations with Kiev solely to satisfy Donald Trump, but the Ukrainian leader left him out of the loop by doubling down.

Thousands of people demonstrated this Saturday in Istanbul in the largest protest so far against the arrest last week of the city's mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's main political rival. AFP and Reuters report hundreds of thousands of participants and the largest demonstration in Turkey for more than a decade, and Efe reports that some 200,000 people filled the Maltepe esplanade, on the Asian side of the city. Özgür Özel, the leader of the opposition CHP party, of which Imamoglu is a member, puts the number of participants at more than two million.

Turkish police arrested Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and main political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Wednesday. He was arrested at his home in a massive police operation, an operation the opposition has called political harassment.