Vladimir Putin declared Tuesday that Russia is prepared to resume peace negotiations with Ukraine, but only on terms rooted in the 2022 Istanbul draft treaty and the framework discussed at last year’s Alaska summit between Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Putin’s conditions center on agreements that Ukrainian negotiators initialed in Istanbul in spring 2022, which Russia has long argued Kyiv later walked away from under Western pressure. Any settlement must also reflect “the realities on the ground,” a phrase widely understood to mean Russia’s current territorial position, as well as principles Putin outlined in a prior address to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Alongside that statement came a sharp broadside against Washington. Over three days, three senior Russian officials accused the U.S. of failing to follow through on “understandings” reached at the Alaska summit. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said only one side had remained committed to those understandings.
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Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went further, suggesting the Alaska meeting may have been a U.S. “ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime.” His deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, alleged Washington had walked back from “fundamental understandings” reached there, while making clear that communication with the U.S. was not being cut off.
The grievances in Moscow appear connected to a wave of Ukrainian drone strikes reaching far into Russian territory, among them a pair of hits on a Moscow oil refinery in the days prior. Putin claimed Tuesday that “the entire West” is working for Kyiv. Analysts see the Russian complaints as a pressure campaign to pull Trump back into active diplomacy on terms more favorable to Moscow.
U.S. attention has largely shifted away from the Ukraine file since Trump launched a military campaign alongside Israel against Iran in February. Russia and Ukraine previously held six rounds of peace talks, three in Istanbul last year and three more under U.S. mediation in Abu Dhabi and Geneva earlier this year, before that process stalled. The Anchorage summit produced a 28-point peace plan, later trimmed to 20 points, but Kyiv declined to accept terms requiring it to surrender territory.
With both sides projecting strength, Russia pointing to daily battlefield advances and Ukraine claiming momentum at the G7 summit in France, the gap between their opening positions remains substantial.
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