Ukraine’s neutrality and the status of contested areas in the east could be on the table in ceasefire talks due to start on Tuesday, but with Russia’s invasion largely stalled, Kyiv will make no concessions on territorial integrity, officials have said.
As negotiators arrived in Istanbul for their first face-to-face peace talks in more than two weeks, both sides played down the chances of a major breakthrough and a senior US official said Vladimir Putin did not appear ready to compromise.
In the view of Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, a ceasefire was the most his country could hope for from the talks. “We are not trading people, land or sovereignty,” he said.
But the fact that the two sides were meeting at all was seen as a sign the dynamics may be shifting, amid suggestions from Kyiv that Moscow may be more flexible after failing to encircle the Ukrainian capital and force the government’s early capitulation.
“I don’t think there will be a solution soon,” said Alexander Rodnyansky, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “But I have become a little less pessimistic because the Russian side has been miserably failing on the battlefield.”
Russia was “losing troops on a large scale”, Rodnyansky said, troop morale was low and the country may not be capable of keeping up its war effort for long. “As soon as Russia realises they can’t sustain the war effort, they will be forced to consider a peace treaty,” he said. “That is what is driving this whole process.”
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow would not be commenting on the talks because it would “only hurt the negotiation process”, but added that the fact they were continuing to take place in person was, “of course, important”.
Peskov described comments on Saturday by Joe Biden, in which the US president called Putin a “butcher”, who “cannot remain in power”, as alarming. Biden denied on Monday that he calling for regime change in Russia, saying he was expressing only his personal “moral outrage” at the “brutality” of Putin’s assault.
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have been in near-daily video contact but their last in-person encounter was a bad-tempered meeting between Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Kuleba, on 10 March.
Ukraine’s chief negotiator said his team were working as normal after it emerged that three people involved in talks on 3 and 4 March – including the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who reportedly lost his sight for several hours, and a Ukrainian MP – “experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons”.
With its forces held up by stiff Ukrainian resistance, heavy losses and mounting tactical and logistical problems, Moscow said last week it was shifting its focus to expanding the territory held by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Both sides have spoken of a possible formula under which Ukraine may accept some kind of formal neutral status with international security guarantees, but neither has shifted on Russia’s territorial claims, which include Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014, and the eastern Donbas region.
Zelenskiy hinted at possible concessions this weekend, however, saying some form of compromise involving Donbas may be possible. He stopped short of suggesting the region may be ceded, stressing “territorial integrity” was Kyiv’s absolute priority.
Lavrov said a meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy – who have met only once, in Paris in 2019 – would be counterproductive at this stage, but added that one would be needed “as soon as we are close to resolving all key issues”. He repeated Moscow’s demands for Ukraine’s demilitarisation, “denazification” and future neutrality.
Zelenskiy, who has suggested the question of neutrality should be put to voters in a referendum after Russian troops withdraw, said Kyiv understood it was “impossible to liberate all territory by force”, but added that his country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity were beyond doubt. Effective security guarantees would be essential, he said.
Vadym Denysenko, a Ukrainian interior ministry adviser, said on Monday he saw “little chance of a major breakthrough”, while Rodnyansky said that until Russia was willing to compromise the peace process risked “being just a distraction – a trick to fool the west” into believing further sanctions were unnecessary.
A senior US official said on Monday he saw no indication of concessions from Putin so far.
“Everything I have seen is he is not willing to compromise at this point,” the state department official told Reuters. “So how far we go in trying to offer him off-ramps that undercut the sovereignty of Ukraine and the decisions that Zelinskiy would have to make, I don’t have a good insight for you.”
In an interview with the Economist, Zelenskiy said he did not think Putin visualised “in his own mind the same Ukraine we see. He sees Ukraine as a part of his world, his worldview, but that doesn’t correspond with what’s happened over the last 30 years.”
He said Moscow was “throwing Russian soldiers like logs into a train’s furnace” and criticised the west’s sanctions as “incomplete”.
“We believe in victory. It’s impossible to believe in anything else,” Zelenskiy said. “We will definitely win because this is our home, on our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.”
Russia’s invasion, which was launched on 24 February, has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million people from their homes, including almost 4 million who have fled abroad, mainly to Poland.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the situation in Mariupol was “catastrophic”, with about 170,000 civilians encircled by Russian forces and supplies of food, water and medicine dwindling fast. A spokesperson for the city’s mayor said almost 5,000 people, including about 210 children, had died. France, Greece and Turkey are hoping to launch a mass evacuation from the devastated southern port city within days.
Ukraine’s economy minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, said on Monday the invasion had so far cost the country nearly $565bn (£431bn) in terms of damage to infrastructure, lost economic growth and other factors, with 4,970 miles (8,000km) of roads and 10m sq metres of housing damaged or destroyed.
Ukrainian forces went on the offensive last week, pushing Russian troops back in areas around Kyiv and in the north-east and the south-west. Russia’s armoured columns are largely bogged down, with trouble resupplying and making little or no progress, although they continue to pulverise residential areas.
“As of today, the enemy is regrouping its forces, but they cannot advance anywhere in Ukraine,” the country’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, said on Monday.
A senior Ukrainian military official said the country’s defence forces were holding back Russian troops trying to break through from the north-east and north-west, while in the south they were focused on defending the cities of Krivy Rih, Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv.
