Russian, American, and Ukrainian diplomats will (probably) meet Friday in Istanbul, Türkiye, to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. Don’t expect any progress.
Vladimir Putin will not be there. Donald Trump will not be there. Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not be there. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has called the Ukrainian president “pathetic,” won’t be there either, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov will be.
For days, the media has tried to suss out whether Putin would show, as Zelenskyy said was essential to any possibility of success. But after the Kremlin announced that the Russian president would not be coming to Istanbul, Zelenskyy said at a press conference that it wasn’t he who proposed direct talks but rather Putin who suggested a meeting in Istanbul. "I didn’t make any proposals to Putin,” Zelenskyy said. “We all understood that he was offering direct negotiations … because he didn’t want a ceasefire."
Putin’s no-show is no shock to anyone who has even cursorily followed the slaughterfest he initiated in February three years ago with the certainty he’d be toasting his generals in occupied Kyiv by April. Peace is not now his objective except in the sense of making a wasteland and calling it peace.
On Day 116 of his presidency, Trump, who a zillion times during the campaign said he would end the war on Day 1, told a BBC reporter: “Look, nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together, OK? He wasn't going if I wasn't there, and I don't believe anything's going to happen, whether you like it or not, until he and I get together, but we're going to have to get it solved because too many people are dying."
Rubio later said much the same: "It's my assessment that I don't think we're going to have a breakthrough here until the President (Trump) and President Putin interact directly on this topic."
Normally, international negotiations on significant matters require extensive preparations ahead of time by the hardworking minions of the diplomatic corps, and the top leaders only show up to sign documents after the details are hammered out down to every comma and contentious word choice. But getting there takes a clear commitment on the part of all parties that’s non-existent in this instance.
Since talking with Putin in Helsinki seven years ago with only a Russian translator present, Trump has bragged many times he fully understands the would-be tsar. He’s also noted that he’d even talked to Putin in the years between his two terms of office.
So if Trump truly wanted to end the war and stop the dying he could have rung up his pal Vlad Vladimirovitch a few weeks ago when the White House was planning the Persian Gulf states trip and set a date for the parties to sit down across from each other. He just could have added another day or two to his itinerary. If Putin had demurred, Trump could have furiously scolded him the way he disgracefully did Zelenskyy at the White House. What we’re getting from him instead amounts to a shrug along with a boast that bringing this war to an end is still up to him.
But he has demonstrated, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, that his true interest is in all the big-dollar deals he gets to announce have been signed on his trip. Previously, he had got Zelenskyy to sign a mineral deal. You just know he’d love to sign a deal with Putin, say, a pledge by the U.S. to leave NATO in exchange for 50% of Russian uranium. Of course, there would have to be a Trump Tower in the mix somewhere.
