President Vladimir Putin has declared Russia’s readiness to resume peace negotiations with Ukraine on a three-part foundation: the draft agreements initialled by Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul in 2022, the modalities discussed at the August 2025 Putin-Trump summit in Anchorage, and the “realities on the ground” – a reference to Russian territorial gains. Speaking during a video conference with government members, Putin also invoked principles he laid out in a June 2024 address to the Russian foreign ministry, and stated he saw no reason for Moscow to depart from the Istanbul texts. He dismissed Ukrainian military actions as attempts to create an “impression of strong positions” ahead of any talks, asserting that Russian forces are advancing daily.

The Istanbul framework, negotiated in March 2022, centred on Ukrainian neutrality and a renunciation of NATO membership, but collapsed weeks later. Kyiv has long maintained that the draft lacked enforceable security guarantees and that trust in Moscow was absent. The Anchorage encounter between Putin and then-US president Donald Trump reportedly produced an outline – referred to in Moscow as the “Anchorage formula” – envisaging Russian control of the entire Donbas and a freeze of the front line in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. The 2024 foreign ministry speech added a demand for the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the four oblasts within their administrative borders and international recognition of those territories as part of Russia. Taken together, analysts in Moscow note, these three pillars restate maximalist objectives that Kyiv and European governments have repeatedly rejected.

The gap between the negotiating baselines was underscored the same day. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov characterised a 7 June joint statement by French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz – which called for a ceasefire along the current line of contact – as a demand for Ukraine’s capitulation. Western officials, by contrast, have framed such a ceasefire as a step toward a political settlement. The Kremlin’s own messaging has shifted: in March, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Istanbul agreements no longer served as a basis because “the reality has changed entirely”; Putin’s latest remarks reinsert them as a reference point, though combined with later conditions that go well beyond the 2022 draft.

On the battlefield, Putin claimed that Ukrainian strikes on civilian infrastructure, including a bus carrying Belarusian athletes and a college in Starobilsk, do not alter the frontline dynamic, where he said Russian units are “liberating one territory after another.” No new talks are scheduled. Turkey has offered to host a round, and the last US-mediated contact took place in Abu Dhabi in February. For now, the dossier remains frozen, with each side insisting on a starting point the other considers unacceptable.