By Anton Kolodyazhnyy, Steve Holland and Lidia Kelly
MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump’s offer to join proposed Ukraine-Russia peace talks triggered a flurry of diplomacy as powers from Europe to the Middle East sought a possible path out of the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday proposed direct talks with Ukraine and, after Trump publicly told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to accept, Zelenskiy said he would but that Putin should attend in person.
Then in a surprise on Monday, Trump – who is due to visit Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar this week, offered to join the Ukraine-Russia talks in the Turkish city of Istanbul, which straddles the divide between Europe and Asia.
“I’ve got so many meetings, but I was thinking about actually flying over there. There’s a possibility of it, I guess, if I think things can happen, but we’ve got to get it done,” Trump said before departing for his second foreign trip since his second term in the White House began in January.
“Don’t underestimate Thursday in Turkey,” Trump said.
After Trump’s offer, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the “way forward for a ceasefire” in Ukraine with European counterparts, including the foreign ministers of Britain and France, and the EU’s foreign policy chief.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and his German and Polish counterparts were also on the call.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan. The Kremlin has repeatedly thanked China and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar for their help in mediating.
Putin sent thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, unleashing a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and triggered the gravest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Reuters reported last year that Putin was open to discussing a ceasefire with Trump but that Moscow, ascendant in the war, ruled out making any major territorial concessions and insists Kyiv abandon ambitions to join NATO.
ISTANBUL TALKS
After Trump told Zelenskiy to agree to Putin’s offer of talks, the Ukrainian wartime leader said he would be willing to meet Putin in person in Istanbul, though the Kremlin has made no comment on whether or not Putin will travel himself.
“We are committed to a serious search for ways of a long-term peaceful settlement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.
Before reporters could ask any more questions about the proposed talks, Peskov said: “That’s all. I’ve said everything I could about this story.”
Putin and the Kremlin have repeatedly mentioned the 2022 draft deal which Russia and Ukraine negotiated shortly after the Russian invasion started.
Under that draft deal, a copy of which Reuters has reviewed, Ukraine should agree to permanent neutrality in return for international security guarantees from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
If Zelenskiy and Putin, who make no secret of their contempt for each other, were to meet on Thursday it would be their first face-to-face meeting since December 2019.
Ukraine and its European allies told Russia that it would have to accept an unconditional 30-day ceasefire from Monday or face new sanctions, though the Kremlin said it would not be spoken to with ultimatums.
Russia’s forces control just under a fifth of Ukraine, including all of Crimea, almost all of Luhansk, and more than 70% of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, according to Russian estimates. It also controls a sliver of Kharkiv region.
Russia is still advancing, though more slowly than in 2024, and both sides said fighting was taking place along the front, though some said the talks in Istanbul offered a potential chance to end the bloodshed.
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, told the Izvestia media outlet in remarks published on Tuesday that the talks between Moscow and Kyiv can move further than they did in the 2022.
“If the Ukrainian delegation shows up at these talks with a mandate to abandon any ultimatums and look for common ground, I am sure that we could move forward even further than we did,” Izvestia cited Kosachev as saying.
(Reporting by Costas Pitas, Steve Holland, reporters in Moscow and Kyiv, and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne;Writing by Costas Pitas and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Michael Perry)
