Reuters
US diplomat Marco Rubio said he doesn’t have high hopes for peace talks as it will be held between Ukraine and Russia in Turkey, and insisted that Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin need to meet.
“It’s my opinion that I don’t think there’s a breakthrough here until President Trump and Putin interact directly with this topic,” he said after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in southern Turkey.
Previously, Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that Ukraine would send a delegation to meet Russian officials in Istanbul, but accused Russia of not taking them seriously.
Speaking to an Ankara reporter, he criticized the “low-level” Moscow delegation. Its head, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, claimed that the Kremlin team had “all necessary capabilities.”
Earlier in the day, Trump, visiting the Middle East, suggested that major advances in peace negotiations were unlikely until he and Putin met in person.
Asked by the BBC to Air Force 1, he asked if he was disappointed with the level of the Russian delegation and said, “Look, nothing will happen until Putin and I gather.”
“He didn’t go if I wasn’t there and until he and I are together, I don’t think anything will happen, whether you like it or not, but we have to solve it because too many people are dying,” he added.
Trump said on Friday he said he would return to Washington later if it was “appropriate” for talks in Turkey.
Delegations from Türkiye, the US, Ukraine and Russia were scheduled to meet in Istanbul on Thursday for their first in-person Ukraine-Russia discussions since 2022. On a Thursday evening, there was no time for them to be held. Several reports suggest that they could happen on Friday.
Watch: Nothing will happen until Putin and I get together, Trump says
Vladimir Putin proposed an in-person meeting in Istanbul on May 15 in response to a call from European leaders and Ukraine for an unconditional ceasefire of 30 days.
Zelensky then challenged Putin to meet him in person, but on Thursday the Kremlin said the Russian president was not among the officials for the trip.
In Ankara, Zelensky accused Moscow of being “disrespectful” to Trump and Erdogan for the lack of seniority in the Russian delegation, and personally repeated his challenge to Russian leadership.
“There’s no meeting time, no agenda, no delegation level. This is personal rude to Erdogan and Trump,” he said.
Meanwhile, Medinsky told reporters in Istanbul that Russia saw the “continuation” and meeting of the failed negotiations in 2022 that took place shortly after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbors.
“The challenge of direct negotiations with the Ukrainian side is to sooner or later reach a long-term peace establishment by eliminating the fundamental root causes of the conflict,” Medinsky said.
EPA
Presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Moscow delegation, claimed that the Kremlin team had “all necessary capabilities.”
The Istanbul story marks the first direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine since its 2022 failures in efforts.
Members of the Turkish delegation in Moscow are involved in these consultations and Russia wants to take it where they left off.
Conditions under discussion included a demand for Ukraine to become a neutral state, reduce military size and abandon its NATO membership ambitions.
The fight in Ukraine saw Russia win two more villages in the eastern Dontescu region on Thursday, Russia said.
Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory, including the southern Crimea Peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014.
British Defense Minister John Healy called on Ukrainian allies to “put pressure on Putin.” After a meeting with German counterpart Boris Pistorius in Berlin on Thursday, Healy urged further sanctions against Russia to be “taken to the negotiation table.”
