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Vladimir Putin has said he wants a “lasting and stable peace” in Ukraine but given no indication that he is willing to make any concessions to achieve it, after a week in which Russian missiles and drones again caused death and destruction across Ukraine.
“We need a lasting and stable peace on solid foundations that would satisfy both Russia and Ukraine, and would ensure the security of both countries,” said Putin, speaking to journalists on Friday, a week before a new deadline imposed by Donald Trump for hostilities to cease.
Trump has said if Russia and Ukraine do not come to an agreement to end the war by next Friday, 8 August, he will impose a package of economic sanctions on Russia.
Before he took office, Trump had promised to end the war in 24 hours, but since he became president his repeated overtures to Putin have achieved minimal results. In recent weeks, Trump has markedly changed his rhetoric on the conflict, appearing less conciliatory to Putin and more amenable to enhanced support for Ukraine. He called Russia’s continued attacks on civilian areas “disgusting” on Thursday.
Last month Trump said he was “disappointed” with Putin. “We’ll have a great conversation. I’ll say: ‘That’s good, I’ll think we’re close to getting it done,’ and then he’ll knock down a building in Kyiv,” he told the BBC.
Seemingly referencing Trump’s comments, Putin said on Friday: “As for any disappointments on the part of anyone, all disappointments arise from inflated expectations. This is a well-known general rule.”
The death toll from a series of Russian strikes on Kyiv in the early hours of Thursday rose sharply on Friday, to 31, after rescuers found more than a dozen bodies in the rubble of an apartment block that had collapsed after one of the strikes. There were five children among the dead, including a two-year-old, while 159 people were wounded in the attack, one of the worst to hit the Ukrainian capital in more than three years of full-scale war.
Putin has periodically claimed to be interested in peace, but only on terms wholly unacceptable to Kyiv. Last week, the third round of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Istanbul, but broke up in less than an hour and have so far led to no agreements except on prisoner exchanges.
Speaking to reporters at a meeting with his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, in northern Russia, Putin said he hoped the peace talks would continue, and that they should be conducted “without cameras and in a calm atmosphere”.
Ukraine, however, says Russia has shown it is not serious about the talks by sending a low-level delegation led by Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister known for writing patriotic books about history. “This level of delegation does not have the authority to negotiate, just to spew insults and announce demands,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a Zelenskyy aide, in an interview in Kyiv.
Zelenskyy has said he wants to meet Putin one-on-one, with either Trump or the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as moderator. On Friday, he responded to Putin’s claim of being interested in peace with another suggestion to meet.
“If this is a signal of serious readiness to end the war with dignity and establish a truly lasting peace, and not just an attempt to buy more time for the war and delay sanctions, then Ukraine once again confirms its readiness to meet at the leaders’ level at any time,” Zelenskyy wrote on his Telegram channel.
