AntalyaThe highest-level talks between Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war failed to stop the fighting, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov declaring Thursday that a ceasefire was not even on the cards. the table at his meeting in Turkey with his Ukrainian counterpart.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Lavrov indicated he did not have the authority to negotiate even a 24-hour ceasefire, showing that long-awaited talks, organized by Turkey, failed to alleviate suffering. of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians under Russian fire.
“The general narrative that he conveyed to me is that they will continue their aggression until Ukraine meets their demands, and the least of these demands is surrender,” Kuleba told reporters after gathering for more than an hour around a table in U-shape in the seaside resort of Antalya with Lavrov and Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
There was some hope that Thursday’s meeting might produce a breakthrough because Russia has seemed to ease its diplomatic demands in recent days. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose top diplomat has made a total of 10 calls with his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts since the start of the war, said on Wednesday the meeting could “open the door to a permanent ceasefire.”
But Kuleba and Lavrov’s separate comments after their meeting dashed those hopes. And if the Kremlin really was prepared to back down from its maximalist demands, Lavrov seemed not authorized to do so.
