Putin not ready to meet with Zelenskyy for talks, Turkish official says
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, trying to find a path toward a longer-term cease-fire and negotiations on a peaceful resolution.
While Turkey is a member of NATO, Erdogan has good relations with Putin, despite the Russian leader’s antipathy toward the Western military alliance.
Erdogan spoke to Zelenskyy and Putin on Thursday to gauge their positions, and Kalin was on the calls.
The Turkish official said Putin no longer advocated replacing Zelenskyy but “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. Of course, we all want this to happen sooner rather than later, but probably Putin thinks that he wants to be in a position of strength when he does that.”
That time is not yet and may not be soon, Kalin said. But the economic sanctions are probably having the most effect on Putin’s thinking, he said.
The Ukrainians “want a peace deal sooner rather than later, regardless of the opinions of others,” he said, even if some NATO countries are worried about Russia being rewarded for its war of aggression while at the same time being unwilling to fight the Russians themselves.
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.
Ideally, Kalin said, the solution will be found in some new version of the Minsk accords, which were meant to provide significant autonomy within Ukraine to the Russian-supported separatist enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk.