Russia-Ukraine Negotiations

War will continue until "Russia decides to end it," UN Secretary-General says

The war in Ukraine will continue until "Russia decides to end it," the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told CNN on Wednesday. "The war will not end with meetings,” he told CNN's Anderson Cooper during a wide-ranging interview. "The war will end when the Russian Federation decides to end it and when there is – after a ceasefire – a possibility of a serious political agreement. We can have all the meetings but that is not what will end the war"...

Lavrov says sanctions being discussed with Ukraine, Kyiv denies it

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said the lifting of sanctions imposed on Russia is part of peace talks with Ukraine, but senior Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak denied that this was the case... "The talks' agenda ... includes, among other things, the issues of denazification, the recognition of new geopolitical realities, the lifting of sanctions, the status of the Russian language," Lavrov said, without elaborating... In remarks cited by the office of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he said that "the issue of global international sanctions against the Russian Federation is not discussed at all" within the framework of the Russia-Ukraine negotiations...

Türkiye advances its efforts for Ukraine-Russia peace deal

Turkish Presidential Spokesman Ibrahim Kalin accompanied by Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kiev, his office said. There were no immediate details about the content of Kalin's meetings in Kiev, but Ankara has been mediating between Ukraine and Russia in efforts to end the war...

Germany Rebuffs a Separate Peace in Ukraine

It’s a good bet Vladimir Putin hopes that, as his Ukraine war drags on, Western allies will be tempted to sacrifice Ukraine for the sake of ending the conflict. So kudos to lawmakers in Berlin for staring down Mr. Putin’s many attempts to bully Germany and others into negotiating a separate peace. The German parliament on Thursday passed, 586-100, a resolution calling on Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government to step up its shipments of heavy weapons to Kyiv. The government on Tuesday finally announced it will send Ukraine 50 Cheetah anti-aircraft tanks, although Mr. Scholz still is reluctant to send other systems such as the Leopard tank...

Putin says Russia ready for talks with Ukraine

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin told his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron that Moscow is ready for talks with Ukraine, state news agency TASS reported on Tuesday. “The President of Russia outlined the principled approaches to negotiating with Ukrainian representatives, emphasizing that, despite Kyiv's inconsistency and unwillingness to work seriously, the Russian side is still open to dialogue,” the Kremlin said in a readout of the call...

Lend-Lease Bill Could Help Ukraine Negotiate Peace With Russia

President Joe Biden is expected to sign a bill that will speed up how quickly his administration can send weapons to Ukraine, a bureaucratic shift that could help Kyiv negotiate an end to the war, some experts say... “It sends a message both to Ukrainians and Putin that there will be more weapons and munitions coming in the pipeline,” Warrick said. “Peace negotiations are based not just on the conditions of the moment, but on both sides expectations of how the war would continue if there was no peace.…This strengthens the hands of NATO, Ukraine, and the U.S.”...

Lukashenko, a close Putin ally, departs from the Kremlin’s talking points, saying the ‘war’ has ‘dragged on.’

Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia’s invasion had “dragged on” and called for an end to the “war,” using a word that the Kremlin has assiduously avoided.

Mr. Lukashenko made the remarks in an interview with The Associated Press. Over nearly 90 minutes, he continued to defend the invasion, saying the Ukrainian government was “provoking Russia” and that no one had “closer, more open or friendlier relations” with Mr. Putin than himself.

But his use of the word “war” was itself a departure from the Kremlin’s talking points — its officials use the phrase “special military operation,” and in March, Mr. Putin signed a law making it a potential crime in Russia to simply call the war a “war” on social media or in a news article or broadcast. Mr. Lukashenko also declined to repeat Mr. Putin’s assertion that the campaign was on schedule...