A new round of US-mediated talks between envoys from Russia and Ukraine will take place in Geneva next week, days before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of its neighbor, officials in Moscow and Kiev said on Friday.
The meeting will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s communications advisor Dmytro Lytvyn confirmed the new round of negotiations.
The talks come against the backdrop of ongoing fighting along the roughly 1,250 kilometer long front line, relentless Russian bombing of civilian areas in Ukraine and the country’s power grid, and Kiev’s almost daily long-range drone strikes on war-related assets on Russian territory.
Previous US-led efforts to build consensus on ending the war, most recently two rounds of talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, have failed to resolve difficult issues such as the future of Ukraine’s Donbas industrial heartland, largely occupied by Russian forces.
Zelenskyy said last week that the United States has given Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach an agreement. Previous deadlines set by US President Donald Trump have passed largely without consequences.
Zelensky in Munich
Zelenskyy was in Munich, Germany, on Friday, visiting the first joint Ukrainian-German company for the production of drones. Germany was an important supporter of Ukraine in the war.
He would also hold bilateral and multilateral meetings at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of leading international security figures.
Russia’s larger military has managed to capture about 20% of Ukraine since the start of hostilities in 2014 and the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. Progress on the battlefield has been slow and costly in terms of troops and armor.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that “the Russians are not winning (the war) as some think.”
“This so-called Russian bear is not there,” he told reporters. “It is actually still the speed of a garden snail, what we see in Ukraine – this is how the Russians enter Ukraine, very slowly, with staggering losses.”
Finding compromises is difficult
The negotiators heading to Geneva have the tough task of finding compromises that are acceptable to both Moscow and Kiev.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s advisor Vladimir Medinsky, who led Moscow’s team of negotiators during the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul in March 2022, returns to lead Moscow’s delegation.
The previous two rounds of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi reportedly focused on military issues such as a possible buffer zone and ceasefire monitoring. The return of Medinsky, who has pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist peace terms, could mark a shift to political issues in the next round of talks.
The Ukrainian delegation will again be led by Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.
It was not clear which U.S. officials would be in Geneva. In the UAE capital, the Trump administration was represented by envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
War of attrition
The grim war of attrition continues as the two sides negotiate.
On Thursday night to Friday, a Russian attack killed three brothers between the ages of 8 and 19 in eastern Ukraine, authorities said. Their mother and grandmother survived but suffered multiple injuries, the Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office said.
In Odesa, one person was killed and six others injured in a Russian attack on the city’s port and energy infrastructure, officials said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday that its air defenses shot down 58 Ukrainian drones over several Russian regions and annexed Crimea overnight.
Of those, 43 were downed in the Volgograd region in southwestern Russia, where three people, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured by drone debris, according to the local governor. Ukraine recently targeted the Volgograd oil refinery.
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