By Huseyin Hayatsever and Anastasiia Malenko
ANKARA/KYIV (Reuters) -Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will hold talks in Turkey on Wednesday and meet U.S. Army officials in Kyiv on Thursday in a new drive to revive peace negotiations with Russia.
No face-to-face talks have taken place between Kyiv and Moscow since a meeting in Istanbul in July and Russian forces have pressed on with Moscow’s nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, killing 19 people in strikes overnight.
Efforts to revive peace negotiations appear to be gaining momentum although Moscow has shown no sign of changing its terms for ending the war. It played down a media report that the United States was working on a 28-point peace plan.
UKRAINE’S TOP PRIORITY IS ENDING WAR
Announcing plans to visit Turkey, Zelenskiy said on Tuesday he was preparing to “reinvigorate negotiations” and would discuss with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan how to bring a “just peace” to Ukraine.
“Doing everything possible to bring the end of the war closer is Ukraine’s top priority,” he said of the meetings in Turkey.
Turkey, a NATO member that has remained close to both sides, hosted an initial round of peace talks in the early weeks of the war in 2022, the only such talks until this year when U.S. President Donald Trump launched a new bid to end the fighting.
The Kremlin said Russian representatives would not be involved in the talks but that President Vladimir Putin was open to conversations with the United States and Turkey about the results of the discussions.
Axios reported on Tuesday that Washington has been secretly working on a roadmap to end the war in consultation with Russia.
Asked about the report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday there were no developments to announce on possible peace proposals since Putin and Trump held a summit in Alaska in August.
“So far there are no innovations on this that can be reported to you,” Peskov said.
Putin set out his core conditions in June 2024, demanding Kyiv renounce plans to join the U.S.-led NATO military alliance and withdraw troops from four provinces Moscow claims as part of Russia. Moscow has given no indication that it has dropped any of those demands and Ukraine says it will not accept them.
TOP U.S. ARMY OFFICIALS VISIT UKRAINE
A U.S. delegation led by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is in Kyiv on a “fact-finding mission”, the U.S. embassy in Kyiv said. Army Chief of Staff General Randy George is also in the delegation and he and Driscoll will meet Zelenskiy on Thursday, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
A Turkish source said U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff could also visit Turkey, but there was no immediate announcement of such a visit from U.S. officials. Another source, at the Turkish Foreign Ministry, said Turkish officials would meet only Zelenskiy, and Witkoff was not expected to be part of the Ankara meetings.
Trump’s efforts to broker an end to the war have so far been unsuccessful and he last month abruptly cancelled a planned summit with Putin in Budapest.
Russian forces control about 19% of Ukrainian territory and are grinding forwards, while carrying out frequent attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as winter approaches.
(Reporting by Hüseyin Hayatsever in Ankara and Anastasia Malenko in Kyiv, and Kyiv, Moscow and Istanbul newsroomsWriting by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Peter Graff)
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