“It would be good if during the second meeting we could agree on something,” Andriy Yermak, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, said. After nine hours of talks the negotiators could not agree on a joint statement. “It went the way it did today,” Mr. Yermak said.
Russia’s negotiator, Dmitri Kozak, offered an even more dour assessment. He said the Ukrainian government had not altered its longstanding positions in the settlement talks for the eastern Ukraine conflict, which have been going on for seven years.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
Separate talks in Moscow between the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey L. Lavrov, also went nowhere, with Mr. Lavrov comparing them to, “the conversation of a mute person with a deaf person.”
Ms. Truss had said one purpose of the visit was to convey to Russian officials warnings about the seriousness of Western economic sanctions and other repercussions if they use military force in Ukraine.Mr. Lavrov countered by reiterating Russia’s position that it has no plans to invade Ukraine and that its military is merely conducting exercises.
While diplomacy has borne little or no fruit so far in the crisis, it is not for want of trying by numerous parties.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has offered to mediate, a proposal accepted by Ukraine but declined by Russia. Next week, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is scheduled to visit Kyiv and Moscow. And Russian officials have said they will respond in writing to proposals for security talks offered by the United States and NATO.
Russia has made a series of demands of the West, including scaling back the NATO military presence in Eastern Europe to 1990s levels and guaranteeing that Ukraine could never join NATO. The United States has called those demands “non-starters’’ and instead offered a series of proposals aimed at arms control.
