MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin will not attend talks in Turkey on Thursday with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the Kremlin which named a lower level team for the first direct Russia-Ukraine contacts on their conflict in more than three years.
Zelensky had challenged Putin to meet him in person at the talks, with US President Donald Trump also appearing to urge the Kremlin leader to come to the negotiating table.
The Istanbul negotiations would be the first direct peace talks since discussions in the first weeks of the conflict broke down without a deal.
After days of declining to say if Putin would go, the Kremlin named its negotiating team late on Wednesday. The Russian side will be headed by Vladimir Medinsky, a hardline aide to Putin and ex-culture minister who was involved in 2022 negotiations.
Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov -- who had all been rumoured as top negotiators after leading previous talks with the United States -- were not named in the delegation.
Zelensky said this week that Putin's absence would be a clear signal that he was not genuinely interested in peace.
“I am waiting to see who will arrive from Russia. Then I will decide what steps Ukraine should take,“ Zelensky said Wednesday.
Trump 'possibility'
Trump on Wednesday offered to go to Turkey if Putin also showed up.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected in Istanbul on Friday for part of the talks. Rubio met with Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga on Wednesday on the sidelines of a NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Antalya, Turkey.
Sybiga said on X that he explained Zelenksy’s “vision of further peace efforts” during “this critical week”.
“We discussed in detail the logic of further steps and shared our approaches,“ he added.
Medinsky is seen as influential in advancing Russia's historical claims over swathes of Ukraine and has written text-books advancing a nationalist view of Russian history that has been questioned by independent historians.
The other three negotiators were named as Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin, Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin and Igor Kostyukov, director of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.
Putin last weekend proposed direct negotiations and had come under intense international pressure -- including from some allies -- to meet with Zelensky.
Trump floated the idea of mediating if Putin attended.
“I don’t know that he (Putin) would be there if I’m not there,“ Trump told reporters while on his Middle East tour.
“I know he would like me to be there, and that’s a possibility. If we could end the war, I’d be thinking about that,“ he said.
He said he had a packed schedule but added: “That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it to save a lot of lives.”
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