ISTANBUL — Russia’s Vladimir Putin spurned a challenge to meet face to face with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Turkey on Thursday, instead sending a second-tier delegation to planned peace talks, while Ukraine’s president said now his defence minister would head up Kyiv’s team.
They will be the first direct talks between the sides since March 2022, but hopes of a major breakthrough were further dented by Trump who said there would be no movement without a meeting between himself and Putin.
Zelenskiy said Putin’s decision not to attend but to send what he called a “decorative” line-up showed the Russian leader was not serious about ending the war. Russia accused Ukraine of trying “to put on a show” around the talks.
It was not clear when the talks would actually begin.
“We can’t be running around the world looking for Putin,” Zelenskiy said after meeting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.
“I feel disrespect from Russia. No meeting time, no agenda, no high-level delegation – this is personal disrespect. To Erdogan, to Trump,” Zelenskiy told reporters.
Both Trump and Putin have said for months they are keen to meet each other, but no date has been set.
Pope Leo spoke to Zelenskiy on Monday
Pope Leo XIV had a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday and spoke about ceasefire proposals, Zelenskiy said, in the first known conversation between the newly-elected pontiff and a foreign leader.
Zelenskiy said in a post on the Telegram app that his first conversation with the new pontiff was “very warm and truly substantive”, and that he had invited the pope to visit Ukraine.
He said the two had spoken about Ukrainian children forcibly removed from Ukraine by Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and about efforts to negotiate an end to their war.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed to Reuters that a call had taken place. He did not offer further comment about the content of the call.
Ukraine had a complex relationship with Pope Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis, who died on April 21.
The late pope condemned Russia’s war with Ukraine as an unjustified act of aggression and called Ukraine a “martyred nation.” Francis made appeals for peace at nearly every public appearance, at least twice a week.
But he disappointed many Ukrainians by not explicitly condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin as the aggressor, and by suggesting that Ukraine should sue for peace in order to end the death and destruction.
Russian nationalists call for Moscow to fight on
Even as the prospect of face-to-face talks to end the war in Ukraine in Istanbul edges closer, hawkish anti-Western nationalists in Russia are waging a campaign to keep the conflict going.
“We surrender our weapons, we surrender our country!”, Pavel Gubarev, a pro-Moscow activist in part of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region controlled by Moscow, posted on Sunday, raging against the prospect of the conflict being “frozen” along current lines.
To someone brought up in the West, it might look at first sight as if Putin is under pressure.
However, the so-called ‘Z-patriots’ – named after a symbol Russian forces in Ukraine paint on their vehicles – must conform to certain rules and do not ultimately pose a threat to Putin, three people close to the Kremlin said.
They will be expected to toe the line if and when the moment comes to make peace, the people said.
At the same time, Putin and his intelligence agencies do need to manage Russia’s hardcore nationalists to ensure they don’t disrupt his goals, the three people said.
Analysts say that by arguing for the war to continue, while Trump and some Western European leaders push for a deal, the Z-patriots can sometimes go too far for the Kremlin’s liking by riling up the public and creating expectations of a more ambitious battlefield campaign.
“Their whipping up of people and pushing society to support a bigger military campaign is a hindrance and work goes on to get them to tone down what they are saying or put a sock in it because they stir up society when Putin needs to hold talks,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center who has studied the Kremlin for years.
The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment for the story.
By REUTERS
