The second day of closed trilateral talks involving Russia, the United States, and Ukraine has ended in Geneva. Like the February 17 session, the meeting took place at the InterContinental hotel and lasted about two hours. No breakthrough was announced afterward.
The head of the Ukrainian delegation, National Security and Defense Council secretary Rustem Umerov, said the discussions again focused on two tracks: political and military. According to him, the next step is to reach consensus and present agreed decisions to the presidents. He added that some issues had been clarified, while work on others was still continuing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the military track was moving more easily than the political one, where the sides’ positions remain far apart. This time, the Russian delegation was led by Putin adviser Vladimir Medinsky, who described the talks as “difficult but businesslike” and said a new meeting would take place soon.
Zelensky said that, in his view, Russia is trying to drag out negotiations that could already be nearing a final stage, and he thanked the American side for its attention to detail and patience in contacts with Russian representatives.
According to Axios, Tuesday’s talks reached a dead end because of the position presented by Medinsky. The outlet also reported that the main disagreements remain control over Donbas and security guarantees for Ukraine. Zelensky insists that Kyiv will not accept territorial concessions without reliable guarantees and says a breakthrough on this issue is possible only through a personal meeting with Vladimir Putin.
The Ukrainian president said U.S. mediators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner told him that Moscow was supposedly sincere about ending the war and advised his team to negotiate on that basis. At the same time, Axios reported that one option under discussion involved Ukrainian forces withdrawing from their current positions in Donbas and the territory becoming a demilitarized “free economic zone,” while sovereignty over it remains unresolved.
Zelensky said he was ready to discuss a troop pullback only if Russian units withdrew on a mirror basis. He also stressed that any agreement must be put to a referendum in Ukraine. In his words, any deal involving the loss of sovereignty over Donbas would be rejected by society, while an agreement freezing the current front line could, in his view, win public support.