KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he will be waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Turkish capital this week to conduct face-to-face talks about the more than three-year war.
Putin hasn’t yet said whether he will be at the talks, which U.S. President Donald Trump has urged the two sides to attend as part of Washington’s efforts to stop the fighting.
Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv that he will be in Ankara on Thursday to conduct the negotiations. He plans to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the two will wait for Putin to arrive, he said.
Zelenskyy said that if Putin chooses Istanbul to hold the meeting, then both leaders will travel there.
“If Putin does not arrive and plays games, it is the final point that he does not want to end the war,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian leader added that European and U.S. leaders should follow through with threats of powerful sanctions against Russia, if Putin doesn’t show up for talks.
Overnight, Russia launched 10 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine, the Ukrainian air force said, in its smallest drone bombardment this year.
The Kremlin hasn’t directly responded to for Putin to meet him in person at the negotiating table.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused for the second straight day Tuesday to tell reporters whether Putin will travel to Istanbul and who else will represent Russia at the potential talks.
“As soon as the president considers it necessary, we will make an announcement,” Peskov said.
Russia has said that it would send a delegation to Istanbul without preconditions.
Washington has been applying stiff pressure on both sides to come to the table since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January with .
Military analysts say that both sides are preparing a spring-summer campaign on the battlefield, where a war of attrition has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Monday that Russia is “quickly replenishing front-line units with new recruits to maintain the battlefield initiative.”
Zelenskyy won’t be meeting with any Russian officials in Istanbul other than Putin, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said Tuesday on a YouTube show run by prominent Russian journalists in exile.
Lower-level talks would amount to simply “dragging out” any peace process, Podolyak said.
European leaders have recently accused Putin of dragging his feet in peace efforts, while he attempts to press his bigger army’s battlefield initiative and capture more Ukrainian land.
Russia effectively rejected an demanded by Ukraine and Western European leaders from Monday, when it fired more than 100 drones at Ukraine. Putin instead offered direct peace talks.
But the wrangling over whether a ceasefire should come before the talks begin has continued.
“Ukraine is ready for any format of negotiations with Russia, but a ceasefire must come first,” Andrii Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said Tuesday.
Negotiations are impossible while “the Ukrainian people are under attack by Russian missiles and drones around the clock,” Yermak said in a video address to the Copenhagen Democracy Summit 2025.
Putin has repeatedly of the Ukrainian government, especially Zelenskyy himself, saying his term expired last year. Under Ukraine’s constitution, it’s illegal for the country to hold a national election while it’s under martial law, as it now is.
In a further complication, a Ukrainian rules out negotiations with Putin.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke Monday with the senior diplomats from the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland, who were meeting in London, to assess “the way forward for a ceasefire and path to peace in Ukraine,” spokesperson Tammy Bruce said.
Those European countries had pledged further sanctions on Russia, if Moscow didn’t comply with a full ceasefire that Ukraine had accepted from Monday, but they made no announcement of additional punitive measures.
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