A week of diplomatic manoeuvring, ultimatums and psychological gambits has ended with a sadly predictable result: Vladimir Putin will not be coming to the negotiating table in Istanbul. Nor will he be sending a single cabinet-level negotiator. Instead the Russian delegation will be headed by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky – the same low-level minion that Putin sent to the last round of talks in Istanbul in March-April 2022. Instead of a breakthrough, the great diplomatic effort led by Zelensky and the combined leaders of Europe have elicited nothing beyond a calculated insult from a defiant Kremlin.
This latest cycle of hope and failure in the endgame to the Ukraine war began last week with a joint visit by Sir Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s brand-new chancellor Friedrich Merz to Kyiv. Amid emotional atmospherics, man-hugging and a presidential walkabout through downtown Kyiv Europe’s leaders issued an ultimatum to Putin. A 30-day truce proposed by Zelensky would start on 12 May, or else devastating sanctions would follow. Roundly ignoring the Monday deadline, the Kremlin responded with a surprising late-night broadcast by Putin proposing direct peace talks with the Ukrainians in Istanbul on Thursday 16 May. According to veteran Kremlin reporter Andrei Kolesnikov, Putin penned his speech himself with no consultation with his advisers. Zelensky’s counter proposal was to propose not just officials’ talks in Istanbul but a face-to-face meeting with Putin himself. If Putin failed to show, Zelensky threatened, ‘the world will know who is the true obstacle to peace.’
The world held its breath. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, rarely a man at a loss for answers, deflected questions about whether Putin would fly to Istanbul by admitting to reporters that he had no news for them – he was awaiting orders from the boss. But instead of girding his loins for a mano-a-mano showdown with his arch-enemy Zelensky, Putin and his team were instead busy formulating the precise composition of the high-stacked dung sandwich they were going to serve the Ukrainians.
In addition to Medinsky, a notoriously dim-bulb 54-year-old Putin toady whose years of sycophancy have not even landed him so much as a senate seat or governorship, the delegation heading to Istanbul also co-stars deputy defence minister Colonel-General Alexander Fomin. No Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s long-serving foreign minister. No Yuri Ushakov, a former Russian ambassador to the US who has been a key interlocutor in recent talks with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff. Even Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian-born banker who spent much of his career in the US and who was brought into talks to offer the Trump administration a financial upside, will stay at home.
The choice of Medinsky and Fomin is no coincidence. These two apparatchiks led the abortive previous round of talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul in March-April 2022. ‘We listened to them, and we realised that these are not people sent for talks, but for our capitulation,’ Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podolyak recalled. ‘They had no understanding of the country that they had invaded, and of our resources. They had no idea how to negotiate.’
Among the lowlights of the 2022 talks was an open threat from Fomin. ‘We will keep killing and slaughtering you,’ the general told Podolyak, according to Yaroslav Trofimov’s book Our Enemies Will Vanish. Medinsky, for his part, demanded that Ukraine hand over all its tanks and artillery to Russian forces, accept a reduction of the Ukrainian Army to 50,000 men. Moscow also wanted a different, Russian-friendly government installed in Kyiv, the arrest and trial of ‘Nazis,’ the restoration of Russian as Ukraine’s official language, and a Russian veto over Ukraine’s joining any international organisations – including Nato and the EU. To top things off, Medinsky also demanded that city streets named after Ukrainian national heroes be returned to their old, Soviet names.
‘In those days, we were willing to do almost anything to avoid more bloodshed,’ Podolyak told me in Kyiv last year. ‘But we could not negotiate away our country’s right to a foreign policy. We could not give away our right to defend ourselves.’ Yet in sending Medinsky and Fomin, Putin has confirmed that he intends to pick up precisely where his negotiators left off. And to add insult to injury, the delegation will also include General Igor Kostyukov, the head of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service. Kostyukov is under US, EU, and UK sanctions for involvement in US election interference in 2016, the Skripal poisoning in 2018, cyberattacks on critical European and US infrastructure as well as for his role in planning the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Zelensky is reportedly, and understandably, appalled at the prospect of negotiating with the grotesque passengers of history’s most evil clown car. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, he had to be talked down from sending no-one at all to Istanbul as a protest. While a satisfying gesture, such a refusal would defeat Zelensky’s chief purpose over the last days and weeks, which is to prove to the US that Putin who is sabotaging talks, not Ukraine.
Zelensky is reportedly appalled at the prospect of negotiating with the grotesque passengers of history’s most evil clown car.
So Putin’s low-level delegation will meet with Ukrainian officials, probably led by Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak. Both sides will know that they are wasting their breath. Meanwhile, reports are coming in that Russian troops are gathering on vulnerable sectors of the Ukrainian lines around the Donbas town of Pokrovsk and have pushed Kyiv’s forces out of the village of Malinovka. It seems that a fresh assault, not diplomacy, will be Putin’s more concrete response.
But what of Starmer, Macron and Merz, the brave bunch whose ultimatum to Putin was the wind beneath the wings of this latest attempt to bring a war to and end? On their sortie to Kyiv they spoke loudly. But the stick they carried is, sadly for the Ukrainians, apparently non-existent. Indeed the EU and UK are actually just a few weeks out from their previous supposedly draconian package of sanctions, which in practice were noticed by nobody. The next package, Merz rather feebly announced, would be agreed only in July.
That puts all eyes on Donald Trump, the only western leader who commands the economic clout to actually hurt Putin. Senator Lyndsey Graham, a leading Trump supporter and – unlike his boss – a firm and consistent critic of Putin’s, has prepared a bill of swingeing secondary tariffs that could, if implemented, crush Putin’s ability to export oil and gas to key customers. These include India, China and Europe, which actually increased its imports of Russian liquefied natural gas by 25 per cent in 2024 and has paid far more to the Kremlin in exchange for energy imports than it has given to Ukraine in aid. What remains to be seem is if Trump will back it – and accept the high cost of enforcing those sanctions.
Trump’s irritation at Putin’s reluctance to come to the negotiating table is becoming more and more evident. Last night he told reporters that meeting Putin personally could be ‘a possibility’. There has been unconfirmed speculation that Xi Jinping, guest of honour at Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations last week, called on Putin to wrap up his military adventure in Ukraine, as it complicates his more important and more high-stakes trade diplomacy with the Trump White House. Putin’s refusal to seriously engage in Istanbul seems a high-stakes gamble that could alienate both Washington and Beijing – with no immediately obvious upside.
Zelensky has made a brave attempt to take control of the peace process. But it is sadly clear that for Putin the endgame of this war lies in striking a grand bargain not with the puppets, as he dismissively describes the Ukrainians, but with Washington.
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