Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow is ready to negotiate with Ukraine on the basis of agreements reached in Istanbul in spring 2022.
“Russia, as has been said more than once, is ready for peace talks with Ukraine, ready on the basis of the agreements that were reached back in Istanbul [in spring 2022] and, let me remind you, were initialed by the Ukrainian delegation at the time, which means they were satisfied with everything,” Putin said.
The Istanbul talks took place in the first months of the war in 2022. They produced a draft peace treaty that envisaged Ukraine renouncing membership in NATO and limiting the size of its army in exchange for security guarantees.
Under that draft, Crimea would de facto remain under Russian control, while the fate of the occupied parts of Donbas was to be decided later in talks between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The text of the document leaked to the press two years later.
Those negotiations took place before Russia declared the annexation of four Ukrainian regions and wrote them into its Constitution. Even so, Russian officials, including Putin himself, including in 2024 and later, continued to say that Moscow was prepared for dialogue on the basis of the Istanbul agreements.
At the same time, over the past year Moscow had also demanded talks with Kyiv “on the basis of Anchorage,” referring to Putin’s meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska. In Moscow’s interpretation, that meeting amounted to de facto U.S. consent to Russia receiving the entirety of all occupied regions, including areas not controlled by the Russian army.