Moscow also left it until the eleventh hour to provide any detail about who would be in its delegation. With Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov not included either, it was clear this would not be an empowered team. A further signal of that was the man chosen to lead the delegation, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who served as an arch-patriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020 and who oversaw the recent redrafting of official history school textbooks to advance the Kremlin’s dreary weaponization of historical memory.
All Putin was doing by sending a delegation was to offer the diplomatic bare minimum to prolong the dance. As Zelenskyy noted, aside from his own presence, Ukraine was represented by a top-level delegation “ready to make any decisions that could lead to a long-awaited just peace,” adding, “I’m here. I think this is a very clear message.”
Root causes
So here, yet again, the Kremlin is stalling — a tactic it has employed time and again when participating in negotiations it has little interest in concluding other than on its own full terms. Condition No. 1: It doesn’t want a ceasefire before it gets concessions that would mean the end of democratic Ukraine.
It is yet another sign that a real breakthrough is a remote prospect. The Kremlin is sticking firmly to its maximalist aims all under the guise of wanting a fix to the “root causes” of the war — Kremlin shorthand for eviscerating democracy in Ukraine and thwarting the country’s political trajectory toward NATO. The pseudo-historian Medinsky, the delegation leader, will no doubt be droning on in Turkey about the “root causes.”
The Trump camp has shown so far it is ready to go along with Putin. The Russian leader has purposely set out to change sequencing of negotiations so a ceasefire follows a deal he’s satisfied with rather than the other way round. By doing so he hopes he either wears the U.S. out or forces it to walk away completely — as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested is possible.
The Russian leader and his top aides have emphatically outlined their red lines for a peace deal for months — conditions that would, in effect, rip the state of Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees Ukraine will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, and with severe limitations on weapons. Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern oblasts they claim as part of the Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such.
