Ukraine and Russia are preparing for the first face-to-face peace talks in more than two weeks, which are due to take place in Turkey from Tuesday, but there is no expectation of a major breakthrough, Ukrainian officials said. .
The fact that the next round of talks will take place in person, however, for the first time since a tense meeting between the two countries’ foreign ministers on March 10, signals a change in tone as Russia has struggled to move forward. and gain territory.
When the two sides last saw each other, Ukraine accused Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of ignoring the country’s calls to discuss a ceasefire, and Lavrov claimed that stopping the fighting was not even on the agenda. Since then, they have only met via video call.
Both Moscow and Kiev say progress is being made on proposals for Ukraine to accept some sort of formal neutral status without joining NATO, for example, but they do not seem close to reaching agreement on Russia’s territorial demands, including Crimea, annexed by the Russians in 2014, and territories to the east, in the Donbass region, which Moscow is demanding that Kiev cede to separatists.
“I don’t think there will be any progress on the main issues,” the adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, Vadim Denisenko, said on Monday (28).
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been sending mixed messages in this regard. In a video speech addressed to the Ukrainian population released on Sunday night, he said he would prioritize the country’s territorial integrity in the negotiations in Istanbul.
But in comments made to Russian journalists earlier in the day, he took a different tone, saying Ukraine was willing to discuss the status of the breakaway regions, repeating that any deal must be put to a referendum. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready for that,” she added, speaking in Russian.
A senior Turkish official said talks in Istanbul would start on Monday, but the Kremlin later said talks should start by Tuesday, adding that it was important that they take place in person.
Since the beginning of the war, Western countries have claimed that Russia’s real objective was to quickly overthrow the Kiev government, which Moscow failed to achieve in the face of Ukrainian resistance. Russia keeps up the pressure in southeastern Ukraine, close to the breakaway areas, with the siege of the port city of Mariupol, where there are still tens of thousands of civilians who cannot get out.
The city’s mayor, Vadim Boichenko, said 160,000 civilians were trapped there, without heat and power. Twenty-six buses are waiting to take them out, but Russian forces have not agreed to give them safe passage, he said. “The situation in the city remains difficult. People are beyond the line of humanitarian catastrophe,” Boichenko said on TV. “We need to completely evacuate Mariupol.”
After US President Joe Biden said in a speech in Poland that Putin “cannot remain in power”, senior US officials spent Sunday trying to clarify that the US does not intend to change the regime in Russia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Biden meant that Putin could not be “authorized to war” against Ukraine or any other country. The Kremlin said Monday that the comments were a cause for concern.
After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to take any major Ukrainian cities and signaled on Friday that it was reducing its ambitions to focus on protecting the Donbass region. A leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic said on Sunday that the region was soon to hold a referendum on accession to Russia, just as Crimea did after the Russians seized the peninsula in 2014. Ukraine and joining Russia — a vote that much of the world refused to recognize.
A spokesman for the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, ruled out the possibility of any referendum in eastern Ukraine. “All false referendums in the temporarily occupied territories are null and void,” said Oleg Nikolenko.
The Russian invasion devastated several Ukrainian cities, caused a major humanitarian crisis and displaced around 10 million people, nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s population.
The UN has confirmed 1,119 civilian deaths and 1,790 injuries across Ukraine, but says the real number is likely to be higher. Ukraine said on Sunday that 139 children had been killed and more than 205 injured so far in the conflict.
