Turkish official: Putin holding off on talks

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 serious negotiations on a peaceful resolution to a brutal war that has lasted more than three weeks. While Turkey is a member of NATO, Erdogan has good relations with Putin, despite the Russian leader’s antipathy toward the Western military alliance of 30 nations.

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 “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. 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, and not appear to be weak, weakened by either military losses or by the

economic sanctions.”

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. Even if Crimea is “de facto Russian,” he said, no one will concede to “de jure” annexation.

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.

That is now more complicated since Putin and the Russian Duma, or parliament, have recognized the separatist enclaves as “independent” states covering land not now under their control, as Russia did with South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia after a similar war in 2008.

Russian and Ukrainian officials have been negotiating in Belarus and over video calls. But the Russian delegation is relatively lowlevel, and so far the talks have not touched on the hardest problems separating the two sides, leading Ukrainian officials to believe that Russia is delaying while its military offensive grinds on.

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, when he thinks that he has gotten what he wanted out of this war — compromise, concession, deal — I do not know. But I think we are moving in that direction.”

Lynsey Addario / New York Times Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spoken with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is playing a mediating role between Ukraine and Russia.