After five days of Kiev’s desperate attempt to derail Moscow’s offer to resume serious, direct negotiations between the two countries, hosted by Türkiye—negotiations that were broken off in April 2022 under pressure from London—it appears that a meeting will now be held on May 15 in Istanbul, as originally proposed by Russia. Ukrainian acting president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom U.S. President Donald Trump pressured to engage in direct talks with Russia, had attempted to sabotage the proposed meeting by redefining it as a personal faceoff between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The British-French “Coalition of the Willing” gave their backing to Zelenskyy’s proposed publicity stunt, and even tried to suck Trump into it by suggesting that he participate as well, so long as Putin could be pressured to also attend.
None of that will happen. The Kremlin issued a decree at 22:50 hours Moscow time on May 14, affirming that the delegation for “negotiations with Ukraine” would be headed by Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to the President of the Russian Federation. Medinsky had headed Russia’s team involved in the negotiations in April 2022 when Ukraine broke them off. His naming is consistent with the statement issued yesterday by Putin advisor Yuri Ushakov that these talks are to be a resumption of the negotiations which ended in April 2022. Medinsky’s team will include diplomatic and military specialists.
