The ultimatum of the president of the United States, seems to have returned to Russians and Ukrainians to the negotiating table in Istanbul, where the third round will take place on Wednesday. It will be in the Ottoman Palace of çiragan in Besiktas, where the last round of conversations was already held ,.
Although there is no great optimism about the result of the negotiations, both parties seem willing to meet again once it has begun to count the 50 -day period marked by Washington on July 14.
After several days of speculation, the Turkish presidency reported that the Russian and Ukrainian delegations will meet today, although the Russian part has not wanted to confirm anything officially. The Russian agencies only agreed on the place of the meeting, but reported indistinctly on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Turk Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was more prudent than the presidency and assured that “the third round will take place, as we hope, this week.”
The Ukrainian president, said at the beginning of this week that his advisors had informed him that the meeting would be July 23 and that today there would be more details. However, on Tuesday he only confirmed that the former Minister of Defense and current secretary of the National Security Council, Rustem Umérov, will be the head of the Ukrainian delegation.
Zelenski aspires to get in Istanbul the release of all captives and the return of Ukrainian children who are in Russian hands.
kyiv also continues to insist on a high fire of 30 days before addressing the political arrangement, but Moscow, engaged in the summer offensive in Donbás and in northern Ukraine, refuses categorically.
The Russian chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinski, whose election was recently criticized by NATO, did not want to make statements to his entry into the Duma or Chamber of Deputies.
Kremlin does not expect miracles from Istanbul
Without confirming its presence, the Kremlin today ruled out that “miraculous advances” can occur during the third round of negotiations with Ukraine. “Of course, there is no reason to wait for some kind of miraculous advance. Given the current situation, this is hardly possible,” said Dmitri Peskov, presidential spokesman, at his daily telephone press conference.
He tried to lower the expectations of success on the grounds that the agenda the negotiations will be “very complex”, since the peace memorandes of each side will have to be addressed -Russia requires Ukraine the neutrality, which accepts the occupation, reduces the size of its armed forces and renounces repairs-,.
Therefore, Peskov considered that the exchanges of prisoners of war and corpses achieved in the first two rounds can already be considered a “fruitful” result.
As for a future summit between Zelenski and the Russian president, – something that has proposed the first for months and rejects the second – said that “there is still much to work.”
The spokesman also refused to confirm if this year it will be possible to achieve a definitive peace, since “many factors” are at stake. “I would not talk about possible deadlines (…) Now, any prognosis would be wrong,” he said.
Putin, neither knows nor answers
Faithful to his style, Putin has not commented on Trump’s threats of sanctions and secondary tariffs in case Russia does not achieve an agreement with Ukraine before early September.
The Russian press believes that, although Moscow is aware that the US does not even irritate the US leader. “It is a Ukrainian ambush for Trump. By accepting new weapons supplies for kyiv, Trump already put a foot in the Ukrainian trap. One more step and the trap will close completely. And Trump can no longer be slipped. Thus it happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan,” said Alexéi Pushkov, known Russian senator.
In this regard, Lavrov expressed his confidence today that the “rational” position defended by the Trump administration, which supports dialogue over all things -according to Moscow -does not happen “unnoticed” in Europe.
However, the German Foreign Minister Friedrich Merz, said Monday that he has the “general approval” of the United States so that Washington sends the systems -cinco, according to the Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius- that Berlin wants to deliver to kyiv.
