Putin says Russia ready for talks with Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he was ready for talks with Ukraine, on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul in 2022.

“Are we ready to negotiate with them? We have never refused to do so, but not on the basis of some ephemeral demands, but on the basis of those documents that were agreed and actually initialled in Istanbul,” Putin said at a forum in Vladivostok.

Russia has previously said that Kyiv’s incursion into the Kursk region made talks impossible.