Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on May 15, \u201cwithout preconditions\u201d to achieve \u201clasting peace\u201d and \u201celiminate the root causes\u201d of the three-year conflict.<\/p>\n
The offer, delivered early on Sunday, came hours after the leaders of Ukraine, France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom called for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire to start on Monday.<\/p>\n
The leaders, who were meeting in Kyiv, said their call is backed by United States President Donald Trump and threatened \u201cmassive\u201d new sanctions on Moscow if it did not agree with their plan.<\/p>\n
Putin did not explicitly address that call in his comments, but slammed European \u201cultimatums\u201d and \u201canti-Russian rhetoric\u201d before outlining the counter-proposal for renewed Russia-Ukraine negotiations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are proposing that Kyiv resume direct negotiations without any preconditions,\u201d the Russian president told reporters. \u201cWe offer the Kyiv authorities to resume negotiations already on Thursday, in Istanbul.\u201d<\/p>\n
Putin said that he would speak to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later on Sunday about facilitating the talks.<\/p>\n
There was no immediate response from Ukraine to the proposal.<\/p>\n
But Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously said he was ready for peace talks, but only after a ceasefire is in place.<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, has left hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and triggered the gravest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.<\/p>\n
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held direct talks in Istanbul in the first weeks of the conflict, but failed to agree to halt the fighting.<\/p>\n
Putin said Russia was proposing restarting the talks in an attempt to \u201celiminate the root causes of the conflict\u201d and \u201cto achieve the restoration of a long-term, lasting peace\u201d rather than simply a pause for rearmament.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do not exclude that during these talks we will be able to agree on some new ceasefire,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Putin, whose forces have advanced over the past year, has faced increased public and private pressure from Trump as well as warnings from European powers to end the war.<\/p>\n
But he has offered few concessions and has stood firm in his conditions for ending the war.<\/p>\n
In June 2024, Putin said Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia.<\/p>\n
Russian officials have also proposed that the US recognise Russia\u2019s control over about one-fifth of Ukraine and demanded that Ukraine remain neutral, though Moscow has said it is not opposed to Kyiv\u2019s ambitions to join the European Union.<\/p>\n
Putin specifically mentioned the 2022 draft deal from the talks in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
Under that draft, Ukraine should agree to permanent neutrality in return for international security guarantees from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, the UK and the US.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not Russia that broke off negotiations in 2022. It was Kyiv,\u201d Putin said. \u201cRussia is ready to negotiate without any preconditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
He thanked China, Brazil, African and Middle Eastern countries and the US for their efforts to mediate.<\/p>\n
Russia, Putin added, had proposed several ceasefires, including a moratorium on striking energy facilities, an Easter ceasefire, and most recently, the 72-hour truce during the celebrations marking 80 years since victory in World War II, but accused Ukraine of repeatedly violating the ceasefires.<\/p>\n
He said that during the May ceasefire, Ukraine had attacked Russia with 524 aerial drones, 45 sea drones, a number of Western missiles and that Russia had repelled five attacks on Russian regions.<\/p>\n
Ukraine, too, has accused Russia of repeatedly violating its own ceasefire.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Saturday, for the first time, the leaders of France, Germany, Poland and the UK travelled together to Ukraine in a visit that\u00a0Zelenskyy said sent \u201ca very important signal\u201d.<\/p>\n
The five leaders, following their meeting in Kyiv, issued a statement calling for a ceasefire \u201clasting at least 30 days\u201d from Monday, to make room for a diplomatic push to end the war.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn unconditional ceasefire by definition cannot be subject to any conditions. If Russia calls for such conditions, this can only be considered as an effort to prolong the war and undermine diplomacy,\u201d the statement read.<\/p>\n
French President Emmanuel Macron said the US would take the lead in monitoring the proposed ceasefire, with support from European countries, and threatened \u201cmassive sanctions \u2026 prepared and coordinated between Europeans and Americans\u201d should Russia violate the truce.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, Trump\u2019s special envoy to Ukraine, said Saturday that a \u201ccomprehensive\u201d 30-day ceasefire, covering attacks from the air, land, sea and on infrastructure, \u201cwill start the process for ending the largest and longest war in Europe since World War II\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the \u201cbloodbath\u201d of the Ukraine war, which his administration casts as a proxy war between the US and Russia.<\/p>\n
Former US President Joe Biden, Western European leaders and Ukraine cast the invasion as an imperial-style land grab and repeatedly pledged to defeat Russian forces.<\/p>\n
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in Moscow\u2019s relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow\u2019s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on May 15, \u201cwithout preconditions\u201d to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[2000,299,36,1824,12,770,7661,657,15,49,286,333],"class_list":{"0":"post-91959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-germany","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-poland","14":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","15":"tag-ukraine","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-us-canada","19":"tag-vladimir-putin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114487603035543895","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}