How did the 2022 Istanbul talks go and what did they end up with?

The Istanbul talks, which Putin has proposed to continue in practice, took place in late March 2022, a few weeks after Russia began a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

At that time, Russia demanded that Ukraine refuse to join NATO and that Kiev accept the status of a non-nuclear and non-aligned state, which Ukraine was ready to do under the condition of security guarantees stipulated in the agreements. The issue of Crimea and Donbass, annexed by Russia, was to be discussed separately at the level of the presidents of the two countries. Kiev has indicated that an agreement can be signed only after a complete ceasefire.

The results of the talks were recorded in the “Istanbul Communiqué”, but no specific agreements were concluded on its development. In mid-June, Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov announced that “everything is over”.

At that time, a BBC source explained the reason for the failure of the talks as follows: “The talks were about the documents that the leaders would sign if they agreed on peace. Now it became clear that peace was impossible at all.”

By this time, in particular, the facts of war crimes by Russian servicemen in the Ukrainian city of Bucha had already been revealed, and Russia had lost the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, which complicated the negotiations, despite Zelensky’s statements about his readiness to continue them.

After Russia annexed four regions of Ukraine in the fall of that year, Zelensky signed a decree that effectively banned direct negotiations with Putin.

Now, Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov said that the negotiations should resume “from where they were stopped in 2022, naturally taking into account the real situation.”

By the spring of 2025, there was renewed talk that the Istanbul Communiqué could be a starting point for new negotiations. In particular, Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's special envoy for the Middle East and also involved in the process of organizing the negotiations on Ukraine, called the talks in Istanbul "concrete and meaningful" and said that they could serve as a "basis for concluding a peace agreement." However, Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, disagreed and said that now the parties "need to develop something completely new."

Photo: Sergei Karpukhin/TASS Read 'Zamin' on Telegram!