Russia and Ukraine’s foreign ministers are gearing up for high-stakes peace talks in Turkey tomorrow, in what will be the first Cabinet-level meeting since Russia invaded Ukraine.
The meeting between Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, is due to take place at an international diplomatic forum in Antalya, southern Turkey.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, has said: “We especially hope that this meeting is a turning point and…an important step towards peace and stability.”
Turkey, a nation with NATO’s second largest power after the US measured by military personnel, shares a maritime border with Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea. It has pitched itself as a possible mediator in the current conflict as it has historically enjoyed good relations with both Kyiv and Moscow.
While President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he has also opposed sanctions against Moscow.
To describe Turkey as a “neutral” country is perhaps misleading. It has strong but competing vested interests with the two countries.
In 2020, Ankara entered into a military partnership to sell weapons to Kyiv. It continues to supply Bayraktar drones which have been some of Ukraine’s most effective weapons in destroying Russian missiles. “I think President Erdogan is one who will make security guarantees for Ukraine,” declared Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, last week.
Russia has a complex relationship with Turkey. There are some major points of contention between the two powers – perhaps most glaringly, Turkish-backed rebel groups continue to fight Russian-backed President Bashar al Assad in Syria.
Yet Ankara has deepened its ties with Moscow in recent years. The two have strong economic links and share similar outlooks. Although Turkey is nominally allied with the West, Putin and Erdogan both dislike European dominance and much of US foreign policy.
Will Turkey’s pivotal position enable tomorrow’s meeting to be the “turning point” that Çavuşoğlu so desires it to be?
To some extent, a successful outcome depends on how much progress has already been made.
The general line being towed is that the previous three rounds of peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations on the Belarus border have failed to produce any concrete results.
However, there are some contradictory reports emerging, which indicate we could be closer to seeing a deal than most realise. Indeed, details appearing in the Jerusalem Post newspaper about the meeting which took place in Moscow four days ago between Putin and Israeli PM, Naftali Bennett, tell a more nuanced story.
During his tete-a-tete with the Russian president, Bennett reportedly discovered that Putin has offered Zelensky a “final” version of his offer to end the crisis which Ukrainian President will need to either accept or decline in the coming days.
If Zelensky accepts the “offer”, it would mean him recognising the the two Donbas states as independent, pledging that Ukraine will never join NATO and declaring neutrality.
Zelensky’s defiant address to UK parliament yesterday would imply he is nowhere near conceding to these demands. Israeli sources knowledgeable about the content of the Putin-Bennet meeting indicate, however, that: “Zelensky is torn.”
The real behind the scenes negotiations between Ukraine and Russia are far more serious than many of Ukraine’s allies realise, argues the Jerusalem Post. Its sources suggest that: “Kyiv has not shared with the West what has been going on in the negotiations since it does not want to damper the worldwide sense of emergency.”
