Istanbul 2022

As the world awaits news from Moscow, Russia still refuses to say if President Vladimir Putin will attend Thursday’s meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart in Turkey.

The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia will announce its representative for the expected peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul once Putin “deems it necessary”.

He also did not confirm whether Russia’s president would attend the meeting himself or send someone else.

All Peskov said was that “the Russian side continues to prepare for the talks in Istanbul”.

Meanwhile, Kyiv is also preparing, as Zelenskyy repeated again that he is ready to come to Turkey personally and is expecting an answer from Moscow.

“Moscow has remained silent all day regarding the proposal for a direct meeting. A very strange silence”, he said on Monday evening, adding that one way or another, Russia “will have to end this war”.

“The sooner, the better. There is no sense in continuing the killing,” Zelenskyy emphasised.

Zelenskyy’s office has signalled that Ukraine’s president would not meet any other official apart from Putin, however.

Presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak said on Tuesday that any talks with lower-level representatives would be pointless.

“Only Putin can make a decision to continue the war or stop the war,” Podolyak said.

Podolyak is well-informed in this regard: he was representing Ukraine in the first attempted talks between Russia and Ukraine, just days after Moscow’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

‘Istanbul 2022’

On 28 February 2022, four days into Moscow’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian and Russian officials sat down for the first attempted negotiations to put an end to the war.

The delegations met on Ukraine’s border with Moscow’s key ally, Belarus, following the call between Zelenskyy and his counterpart in Minsk, Alexander Lukashenko.

After a few rounds of talks in Belarus and then online, the delegations met in Istanbul on 29 March 2022.

Ukraine called for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of Russian forces from its territory.

Russia insisted on what the Kremlin calls “root causes” of the war, voiced by Putin, as the reasons to invade Ukraine.

According to Moscow, these include NATO’s alleged violation of commitments not to expand into eastern Europe and along Russia’s borders, the Ukrainian government’s alleged discrimination against ethnic Russians and more blurry arguments, such as what Putin calls the “denazification” of Ukraine.

Putin and Russia have failed to provide evidence for any of these allegations so far.

Now, the Kremlin wants the new round of talks to proceed from where the sides left off in March 2022.

Istanbul 2022 vs Istanbul 2025

Addressing the media outlets late at night over the weekend, Putin proposed that Russia and Ukraine “resume” the direct negotiations that he claimed “Ukraine interrupted” on 15 May 2022.

Russian presidential aide Yuriy Ushakov later reiterated the Kremlin’s official position, saying that negotiations should account for “developments of the 2022 talks”.

The Istanbul 2022 draft agreement included terms US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War equates to complete Ukrainian surrender.

According to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the 2022 draft protocols demanded that Ukraine forego its NATO membership aspirations and amend its constitution to add a neutrality provision that would ban Ukraine from joining any military alliances, concluding military agreements, or hosting foreign military personnel, trainers, or weapon systems in Ukraine.

Moscow also demanded that Russia, the US, the UK, China, France and Belarus serve as security guarantors of the agreement.

Russia demanded that the guarantor states “terminate international treaties and agreements incompatible with the permanent neutrality of Ukraine” including military aid agreements.

Moscow also insisted that the Ukrainian military should be limited to 85,000 soldiers and Ukrainian missiles wouldn’t exceed the range of 40 kilometres, which would allow Russian forces to deploy critical systems and materiel close to Ukraine without fear of strikes.

Three years later, Moscow seems to be willing to insist on the same demands, despite the fact that Russia has not fulfilled any of its strategic goals in Ukraine, couldn’t capture any regional capital and has not even reached the administrative borders of Luhansk and Donetsk regions, the areas Moscow has occupied since its initial invasion in 2014.