United States President Donald Trump said he is considering traveling to Turkey on Thursday for possible Russian-Ukrainian talks, to which Volodymyr Zelensky has personally invited Vladimir Putin, while the Kremlin declined to comment on who would be in the Russian delegation.
"I will wait for Putin in Turkey on Thursday. In person. I hope that this time the Russians will not look for excuses," Zelensky said yesterday.
DON'T MISS IT
"There is a possibility, I guess, that I think that could happen," the US president told reporters at the White House today, just before departing for Saudi Arabia where he is due to begin his Middle East tour, scheduled to last until Friday.
Ukrainian President Zelensky immediately reacted and said that he would be in Turkey for those talks and that he hoped that Trump would be there as well.
Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Saturday. Zelensky then responded by offering to meet Putin in person in the city.
The Kremlin has not responded to the offer for a Putin-Zelensky meeting since then.
Asked today about the composition of the Russian delegation in Istanbul, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment.
Zelensky this evening condemned Moscow's "very strange silence" regarding direct negotiations.
Zelensky also said he had spoken with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan said he hopes that a chance for peace has opened up and that he hopes it will not be lost.
Kiev and its European allies demanded over the weekend an unconditional and complete 30-day ceasefire starting Monday, which they said would be a prerequisite for direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and threatened Moscow with "massive sanctions" if it refused.
DON'T MISS IT
But the Kremlin today rejected that approach and said the language of the ultimatum was unacceptable to Russia.
Peskov said that Moscow wants serious negotiations to bring peace to the conflict, which was triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukrainian territory in February 2022.
The foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Great Britain, as well as the European Union (EU) foreign policy chief, today reiterated the call for a 30-day ceasefire.
"So far, Russia has not shown any serious intention to make progress. It should do so without waiting," they said in a statement released after the meeting in London.
Diplomatic moves have accelerated in the last three days, while indirect negotiations between Kiev and Moscow, which Trump launched in mid-February, appear to be at an impasse.
Thursday's direct talks in Istanbul would be the first since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, when a series of bilateral talks, also partly conducted in Turkey, failed to lead to a ceasefire.
In parallel, nightly Russian attacks on Ukraine continued, as they have done almost every day since the beginning of the war.
On Saturday, when he announced a proposal for direct Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Istanbul, Putin did not rule out discussing a ceasefire, which he said should primarily address the "deep causes of the conflict."
Bonus video:
