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“The idea was discussed that it would be appropriate to study the opportunity of raising the level of representatives of the Russian and Ukrainian sides,” said Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov, briefing reporters on US President Donald Trump’s call with Putin. No mention of either leader by name, or any indication the “representatives” could be raised to that level.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appears on Russian state media on Tuesday, August 19.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appears on Russian state media on Tuesday, August 19. Russian MFA
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took a more conciliatory tone in a state TV interview later Tuesday. “We do not refuse any forms of work – neither bilateral nor trilateral,” he insisted. But: “Any contacts involving top officials must be prepared with the utmost care.”

In Kremlin speak, that means they are nowhere near ready to agree to this.

And that should come as no surprise.

This is a war that Putin started by unilaterally recognizing a chunk of Ukrainian land (the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics) as independent. He has argued Ukraine is “an inalienable part of (Russia’s) own history, culture and spiritual space,” and its separation from Russia is a historical mistake.

So if this meeting happens – as Orysia Lutsevich, the director of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia program puts it – Putin “will have to accept the failure of sitting down with a president he considers a joke from a country that doesn’t exist”.

It would also, she argued, be a huge reversal in tone that would be tough to explain to the Russian people. “(Putin) so much brainwashed Russians on state television that Zelensky’s a Nazi, that (Ukraine’s) a puppet state of the West … that Zelensky’s illegitimate, why is he suddenly talking to him?”

The Kremlin not only routinely questions the legitimacy of the Ukrainian leader, fixating on the postponement of elections in Ukraine, illegal under martial law, but in its latest “peace” memorandum requires Ukraine to hold elections before any final peace treaty is signed. Putin and other Russian officials rarely refer to Zelensky by name, instead preferring the scathing moniker of “the Kyiv regime.” And don’t forget it was Zelensky who traveled to Turkey for the first direct talks between the two sides in mid-May, only for Putin to send a delegation headed by a writer of historical textbooks.
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