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Following a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Minsk, Belarus on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow is once again ready to engage Kiev in direct negotiations regarding ending the Ukraine war. Notably, on Wednesday President Donald Trump told Ukraine’s Dictator Vladimir Zelensky that he will call Putin and ask him to end the war.
While the date and venue of the future talks have not yet been decided upon, draft proposals for ending the war will likely form the basis of the negotiations. Kiev’s peace memorandum called for an unconditional ceasefire, rejected Moscow’s key demands for recognition of new Russian regions, neutrality for Ukraine and limits on the size of Kiev’s military forces. Russia rejected the unconditional ceasefire demanded by Ukraine, possibly because of the other demands.
”These are two completely opposing documents. But that’s exactly what negotiations are for – to look for ways to bridge the gap. The fact that they’re polar opposites isn’t surprising in my view,” Putin said Friday. ”I’d rather not go into details, because I believe it’s neither appropriate nor helpful to get ahead of the negotiations themselves.”
Interestingly, Putin revealed that the heads of both negotiating teams remain in constant contact, speaking regularly over the phone.
These talks will be the third public meeting between the two countries, the second meeting being largely a failure and the first meeting only consisting of diplomats who discussed setting up the second meeting.
Both countries did however exchange documents on the settlement process during the second meeting on June 2. Even then, the two nations were expected to hold a third direct negotiation meeting at a later date. Moscow and Kiev also had agreed to exchange all severely ill prisoners of war as well as those under 25-years-old, according to the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. The corpses of 6,000 soldiers from each side were also decided to be exchanged.
“It seems they’re staging a picture of diplomacy for Trump,” a senior Ukrainian official said of the event.
