Putin not yet ready to talk to Zelenskyy

BRUSSELS — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine called publicly Saturday for direct negotiations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but a senior Turkish official said that Putin was not ready for such talks.

“Zelenskyy is ready to meet, but Putin thinks that the positions to have this meeting at the leaders’ level are not close enough yet,” said Ibrahim Kalin, a chief adviser and spokesperson for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Turkey and Erdogan are playing a significant mediating role between Russia and Ukraine. While Turkey is a member of NATO, Erdogan has good relations with Putin.

Erdogan spoke to Zelenskyy and Putin on Thursday to gauge their positions, and Kalin was on the calls.

The Turkish official said that Putin no longer advocated replacing Zelenskyy but “now accepts the reality of Zelenskyy as the leader of the Ukrainian people, whether he likes it or not.”

“I believe that meeting will take place at some point,” Kalin said. “There will be a peace deal at some point. But probably Putin thinks that he wants to be in a position of strength when he does that, and not appear to be weak, weakened by either military losses or by the economic sanctions.”

The Ukrainians “want a peace deal sooner rather than later,” he said.

But the main difficulty will be how to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, which Ukraine and its allies will not sacrifice. That includes the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed eight years ago.

The most difficult issues, like those of territorial control and sovereignty, will have to be left to the two presidents, Kalin suggested, once lesser issues are resolved. Those include Ukraine agreeing to a form of neutrality barring NATO membership, which Zelenskyy already appears to concede.

But it will also be important for Turkey and its fellow NATO members to start thinking seriously about how to manage relations with Russia once the war ends, Kalin said. “Even though we fully reject the Russian war on Ukraine, the Russian case must be heard, because after this war, there will have to be a new security architecture established between Russia and the Western bloc,” he said.

That topic will be part of an extraordinary summit meeting of NATO countries Thursday, which President Joe Biden plans to attend.

“At the end of the day, it’s President Putin who will call this war off,” Kalin said. “When he will feel like doing it … I do not know. But I think we are moving in that direction.”