Russian forces made creeping advances through Ukraine’s east this week, as the two countries prepared to hold their first direct talks in three years on Thursday.
Russian forces captured the settlement of Kotlyarivka, southwest of the embattled area of Pokrovsk, on Monday, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said.
The seizure brought Russian forces to within 3.7km (2.3 miles) of the regional border between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine.
Russian forces also forced their way into the village of Myrolyubivka, east of Pokrovsk, and claimed to have taken the entire settlement.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed its forces took the community of Mykhailovka, also in Donetsk.
These were minor advances, but showed there was no letup in Russia’s effort to take all of Donetsk and other regions it partly occupies, even as it prepared to go into peace talks.
According to Ukrainian military intelligence, Russia was even moving troops into position for a major new offensive, the United Kingdom’s Financial Times reported.
Peace talks
US President Donald Trump called for a 30-day ceasefire on May 8. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, flanked by the leaders of Poland, Germany, France and Britain, backed that demand on Saturday.
Despite telling Western reporters Russia would “think about that”, the Kremlin ended up insisting on peace talks without a ceasefire, accusing Ukraine of violating previous ceasefires it announced unilaterally.
Instead, Putin proposed peace talks without conditions at a dawn media conference on Sunday.
“We are not ruling out that during these talks we will be able to agree on some new ceasefire, a new truce,” he said.
Zelenskyy has said he would attend the talks in Istanbul if Putin does as well. Putin was expected after his spokesman said Russia would attend “at the corresponding” level, but then his name did not appear on a list of delegates Russia provided.
“If Putin does not show up – if this is another game – it will clearly demonstrate that Russia is not ready to end the war,” Zelenskyy wrote on social media, calling for a new sanctions package in that case.
As of Wednesday night, he was saying: “I am waiting to see who will come from Russia, and then I will decide which steps Ukraine should take.”
US President Donald Trump, currently on a Middle East tour, is claiming credit for this diplomatic initiative.
“I insisted that that meeting take place and it is taking place,” he said.
Trump dispatched his Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and said he “was thinking of actually flying over. There’s a possibility of it, I guess, if I think things can happen.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will host the talks.
“I think we have a window of opportunity this week and in the next 10 days – two weeks – to bring the issue of Ukraine to a more constructive level,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told Turkiye’s Anadolu news agency.
Pressure on Putin?
There appeared to be a connection between Putin’s meetings with foreign leaders on Saturday, and his peace talks proposal at dawn on Sunday.
At 1:30am [22:30 GMT] on Sunday morning, he was still in talks with the leader of South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia.
It was the last of four days of meetings with 23 leaders who came to Moscow for the May 9 parade to celebrate the end of the second world war.
At 4am [01:00 GMT], he alerted the media that he would announce “the results of international events to mark the 80th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany”.
When he invited Ukraine to peace talks in Turkiye less than two hours later, he also thanked foreign partners for their “peace-oriented efforts”, Kremlin newswire TASS reported.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had received a message of support for its call for a 30-day ceasefire from China, perhaps a sign that China privately put pressure on Putin to pursue peace.
A dark outlook for talks
There were strong headwinds going into the talks, however.
Putin’s language when announcing the talks was not friendly.
“The ball is now in the court of the Kyiv government and its curators, who are guided by political ambitions – not their people’s interests – in their desire to continue the conflict with Russia with the hands of Ukrainian nationalists,” he said, a reference to European governments, which have been less keen than the Trump administration to push Ukraine into talks.
Russia is taking a hard line going in. On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Russia would insist on the “denazification of the Kyiv regime”, Moscow’s way of describing Zelenskyy’s removal from office, and recognition of “current realities on the ground” – ie, there will be no territorial concessions.
On Tuesday, almost on the eve of talks in Istanbul on Thursday, Putin was selling Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine to investors at the Delovaya Rossiya (Business Russia) association, implying there would be no territorial concessions. “There is something to invest in there. There are such lands, fertile in terms of agriculture and favourable in terms of tourism development,” he said.
On Wednesday, Russian ambassador-at-large Rodion Miroshnik told reporters that negotiations need not go further than the Istanbul proposals of 2022.
That was when Russia attempted to impose a capitulation agreement in March and April of 2022, when a Russian invasion force threatened to take Kyiv. It named Russia and China as Ukraine’s security guarantors, cut down Ukraine’s armed forces to 85,000 personnel, less than one-tenth of the current Ukrainian army, and forbade Ukraine from joining foreign alliances such as NATO.
“Let’s go back, make adjustments to it that have emerged over the past three years and after that we will move to signing this document,” Miroshnik said.
The Western position ahead of talks has also been hard on Russia.
On the day of Putin’s parade, some 40 world leaders gathered in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to celebrate the end of World War II and announced a tribunal to try Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The tribunal was to be launched in Luxembourg this week, when the Council of Europe was to convene.
On Tuesday, the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization officially held Russia responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014. Pro-Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine used a Russian Buk air defence system to down the plane in July that year, killing all 298 people on board.
On Wednesday this week, the European Union agreed on a 17th sanctions package restricting 200 tankers used by Russia to evade a ban on its oil exports to the EU, bringing Moscow tens of billions in illicit dollars. EU foreign ministers are expected to put the sanctions into force on May 20. European commissioner for economic affairs Valdis Dombrovskis said work would begin immediately on an 18th package.
On Monday, Poland shut down Russia’s consulate in Krakow, after investigators determined that a fire that destroyed the Marywilska shopping centre last year was the work of Russian saboteurs.
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