There Was No Chance in Istanbul: Putin Always Pretends to Want Peace

Has anyone really thought that there would be real peace negotiations in Istanbul? Once again Putin has let everyone go into the void. He can't help himself, because he needs the war, says Ukrainian writer Sergei Gerasimov.

Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian Federation, was reluctant to engage in serious negotiations during the Istanbul process, when the Russian delegation formed a low level of representation.

Istanbul returned, three years later, for a moment, to the center of the war in Ukraine: the delegations from Moscow and Kyiv met there on Friday, May 16, after Vladimir Putin's proposal to hold a round of negotiations in the Turkish city and Volodymyr Zelensky's counterproposal for a summit between the two presidents, which fell on deaf ears. If the idea behind Putin's invitation was to resume contacts from where they had been interrupted, with…