Zelenskyy says he will be waiting for Putin in Ankara on Thursday for
talks
[May 14, 2025]
By SAMYA KULLAB and ILLIA NOVIKOV
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said
Tuesday that he will be waiting for his Russian counterpart, Vladimir
Putin, in the Turkish capital this week to conduct face-to-face talks
about the more than 3-year war, amid heavy pressure from the U.S. and
European leaders to reach a settlement.
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 will meet with Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and the two will wait for Putin to arrive, he said.
Zelenskyy said he would “do everything to agree on a ceasefire, because
it is with (Putin) that I must negotiate a ceasefire, as only he can
decide on it.”
Zelenskyy said that if Putin chooses Istanbul to hold the meeting, then
both leaders will travel there from Ankara.
“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 if Putin doesn’t show up, European and
U.S. leaders should follow through with threats of additional and heavy
sanctions against Russia.
Trump, who is on a four-day Middle East trip, said Tuesday that
Secretary of State Marco Rubio would attend the talks. Special envoy
Steve Witkoff also is set to take part, according to a U.S. official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview plans that have not been
made public.
Washington has been applying strong pressure on both sides to come to
the table since Trump took office in January with a promise to end the
war.
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.”
German leader says ball is in Putin's court
International pressure has been growing to push Ukraine and Russia into
finding a settlement.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pressed again for an unconditional
30-day ceasefire as he met his Greek counterpart in Berlin on Tuesday.
“We are waiting for Putin’s agreement,” he said.
“We agree that, in case there is no real progress this week, we then
want to push at European level for a significant tightening of
sanctions,” Merz added. He said that “we will focus on further areas,
such as the energy sector and the financial market.”
Merz welcomed Zelenskyy’s readiness to travel personally to Turkey, “but
now it is really up to Putin to accept this offer of negotiations and
agree to a ceasefire. The ball is exclusively in Russia.”
Russia isn't saying whether Putin will attend talks
Overnight, Russia launched 10 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine, the
Ukrainian air force said. It was Russia's smallest drone bombardment
this year.
The Kremlin hasn’t directly responded to Zelenskyy’s challenge for Putin
to meet him in person at the negotiating table.
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In this photo taken from video distributed by Russian Defense
Ministry Press Service on Monday, May 12, 2025, Russian servicemen
attend a combat training for assault units in an undisclosed
location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined 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 will send a delegation to Istanbul without
preconditions.
European leaders say Putin is dragging his feet
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 unconditional 30-day ceasefire,
starting Monday, that was demanded by Ukraine and Western European
leaders, 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 questioned the legitimacy 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.
Zelenskyy dismissed claims that a decree enacted by him in 2022
prohibited him from meeting Putin, saying that the claim was Russian
propaganda.
Putin and Zelenskyy have only met once, in 2019.
In the war’s early months, Zelenskyy repeatedly called for a
personal meeting with Putin but was rebuffed. After the Kremlin’s
decision in September 2022 to illegally annex four regions of
Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — Zelenskyy
issued the decree declaring that holding negotiations with Putin had
become impossible.
On Tuesday, Zelenskyy said that this decree affected other Ukrainian
officials who were directly negotiating with the Russian leader.
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AP writers Geir Moulson in Berlin and Matthew Lee in Antalya,
Turkey, contributed to this report.
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