Speaking to his Cabinet Ministers, Putin said Ukraine is run by a “terrorist” regime that targets civilians and is still losing the war. He dismissed the idea of a meeting.
“How to hold such meetings in these conditions? What to talk about? Who even negotiates with those who bet on terror, with terrorists?” he said, adding that “today they suffer one defeat after another on the battlefield. Apparently, we are dealing with people who not only lack any meaningful competence in anything, but also elementary political culture”.
Ukrainian and Russian delegations met on Monday to exchange terms for peace talks. Russia’s terms, made public after the meeting, repeated long-standing Kremlin demands to end the war, such as Ukraine surrendering more territory to Russia, promising not to enter any military alliances and accepting severe restrictions on the size of its military.
Ukraine’s memo called for an immediate unconditional ceasefire, the return of Ukrainian children taken to Russia, no international recognition of lands conquered by Russia and freedom for Ukraine to join Western organisations.
Zelenskyy said Russia’s demands were unacceptable.
“The Russians understood that this was an ultimatum and that the Ukrainian side, or no one, would take it seriously,” Zelenskyy told journalists in Kyiv. He added that if the demands had been made public before the meeting in Istanbul, Ukrainian officials “would have been in their full rights” not to attend.
One of the only results of the talks was a prisoner exchange, which Zelenskyy said will take place this weekend, and some 500 Ukrainian troops would return home. Later, the two sides will exchange the corpses of fallen service members, but this will take longer to allow for proper identification of the bodies.
At the weekend, Ukraine took responsibility for a series of drone attacks against far-flung Russian airfields that disabled several Russian strategic bombers in a shocking attack against assets believed to be far out of range of Ukrainian weapons.
Two bridges also collapsed in the Bryansk and Kursk regions in incidents the Russians are calling terrorist attacks. There were also explosions on the Crimean Bridge connecting the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula with Russia.
Despite these Ukrainian successes, Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre warned that, rather than bringing Putin to the negotiating table, they would instead inspire him to escalate the conflict even further.
“Based on years – now decades – of observing Putin’s decision-making, I believe such attacks will only reinforce his determination to dismantle the Ukrainian state in its current form,” she wrote on X. “He will respond by becoming more hardline and less compliant.”
In addition to Russia’s nightly drone and missile strikes, its forces have been gaining ground in the northeastern Sumy region, taking a number of villages.
Zelenskyy dismissed the recent Russian advances in Sumy as “nothing new” and said that Russian forces “were not achieving any success”. He maintained that Ukrainian forces were well aware of and prepared for the attacks.
