Putin again said that Russia is ready for negotiations with Ukraine - but on the terms that he has already put forward

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is ready to negotiate with Ukraine, but on the conditions that he has already put forward.

“Russia, as has been said more than once, is ready for peaceful negotiations with Ukraine, ready on the basis of the agreements that were reached back in Istanbul [in the spring of 2022] and, let me remind you, were initialed then by the Ukrainian delegation, which means everything suited them,” Putin said.

At the same time, according to him, it is also necessary to take into account the “modalities” that were discussed at his meeting with US President Donald Trump in Anchorage, andthe conditions that he put forward in 2024.

These conditions stipulate that the Ukrainian Armed Forces must withdraw from territories that the Russian army has not captured, that is, from the Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions within their administrative borders.

Amendment. Initially, the news said that Russia, according to Putin, was ready to negotiate with Ukraine “on the basis of the Istanbul agreements” of 2022. At the same time, the news did not clarify that Putin put forward other conditions that he had already put forward more than once. Meduza apologizes to readers for the mistake.

• Negotiations in Istanbul took place in the first months of the war in 2022. As a result, a draft peace treaty was developed, which provided for Ukraine's refusal to join NATO and limiting the size of its army in exchange for security guarantees (this draft was leaked to the press two years later ). Crimea de facto remained Russian, and the fate of the occupied parts of Donbass, as the document provided, was to be decided later in negotiations between Putin and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
• Negotiations in Istanbul in 2022 took place before Russia announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions and included them in its Constitution. Despite this, Russian officials (including Putin himself back in 2024 and later) said that Moscow was ready to conduct dialogue “on the basis of the Istanbul agreements.”
• Over the past year, Moscow has demanded that Kyiv negotiate “on the basis of Anchorage,” referring to Putin’s meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska. In Moscow, that meeting was interpreted as de facto US consent to the fact that the Russian Federation would receive the entire territory of all occupied regions - even those parts that the Russian army does not control.