Russia’s top negotiator in talks with Ukraine, Vladimir Medinsky, said on Sunday that it is too early to speak about a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin that is planned to be held in Turkey.
Medinsky, who led the Russian delegation in Tuesday’s talks in Istanbul, Turkey, said "there is still a lot of work to do" to finalize a draft agreement before Putin and Zelenskyy could meet.
Speaking Sunday in remarks carried by the Interfax news agency, Medinsky reaffirmed that the parties reached a tentative agreement on the need for Ukraine to adopt a neutral status and refrain from holding foreign military bases in exchange for international security guarantees.
Asked about Ukrainian negotiator Davyd Arakhamia’s claim that Moscow’s negotiators had informally agreed to most proposals by Ukraine during the talks in Istanbul this week and the two presidents could discuss the draft deal, Medinsky said he doesn’t share Arakhamia’s optimism. He said the talks will continue online Monday.
"Our task at the moment is to work out the final version of the documents and outstanding issues to enable an eventual meeting of the presidents," Arakhamia said. Should the meeting materialize, he said, it would likely be held in Turkey, Ankara or Istanbul.
Medinsky emphasized that Russia’s stand on Crimea and rebel regions in Ukraine’s east remained unchanged.
The Kremlin demands that Ukraine acknowledge Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, and recognize the independence of Russia-backed separatist regions in Donbass, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland.
Both sides have described the negotiations in recent days as difficult. The talks are a combination of face-to-face sessions in Turkey and virtual meetings.
In a breakthrough, Russian and Ukrainian delegations met for peace talks in Istanbul on March 29 as the war entered its second month with casualties piling up on both sides.
During the talks, Ukrainian officials signaled readiness to negotiate a "neutral status," a key Russian demand, but demanded security guarantees for their country.
Russia, meanwhile, pledged to significantly decrease its military activities toward the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv to build up trust for future negotiations.
Ukraine wants to see a number of countries, including Turkey, as guarantors in a deal with Russia, a Ukrainian negotiator said after the talks.
Turkey also hosted the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine in Antalya earlier this month. Foreign Ministers Sergey Lavrov of Russia and Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine met for talks in the Turkish resort town of Antalya, which Turkish top diplomat Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu also attended. The talks were largely inconclusive, but Ankara hails it as a success for the fact that they took place at all.