Expert says Putin unlikely to ever seek peace deal with Ukraine
Russia is attacking Ukraine with increasing force, and since Russian leader Vladimir Putin assumes that Russia can endure longer, it is not particularly likely that he will ever seek to conclude a peace agreement with Ukraine, says Kristi Raik, director of the International Center for Defense and Security (ICDS).
On September 15, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov blamed the United States for extending Russia's conflict with Ukraine by an additional year. He accused Washington of ending the so-called "Anchorage agreements" between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which Lavrov claimed had the potential to bring an end to the war. Despite repeated references to these purported agreements, U.S. officials have denied their existence.
Lavrov suggested that Europe's pressure on the U.S. to withdraw from these agreements prevented the cessation of hostilities. He asserted that without the U.S.'s backing away from the Anchorage agreements and Europe's "pulling" of the U.S. away, Russia and Ukraine would have been at peace for the past year. The ongoing stalemate in peace talks was attributed to Russia's refusal to accept a ceasefire and its insistence on Ukraine ceding strategically important territory in eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region.
Meanwhile, efforts to broker a broader peace deal remained stalled. The U.S.-led negotiations have hit a roadblock due to Russia's territorial demands, while Ukraine has called for a ceasefire along the front line and security guarantees to prevent future Russian aggression. President Volodymyr Zelensky plans to discuss limited ceasefires with Trump during a potential meeting in New York next week, scheduled for September 21-23.
Lavrov also plans to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the U.N. General Assembly. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump's envoys, previously visited Moscow and Kyiv to attempt to break the deadlock. The most recent outcome was an agreement to resume trilateral negotiations, though previous talks have yielded little political progress and have mainly resulted in humanitarian initiatives such as prisoner exchanges.
Lavrov reiterated Moscow's openness to resuming talks, emphasizing that all previous discussions were interrupted by others, not by the Russian side.
Written by urgent.news from Kyiv Independent's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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