Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
It’s been seven years since the one and only meeting betwee Putin and Zelenskyy.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says that it has not yet been decided if Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to Miami in the US for the G20 meeting scheduled to take place in December, the Moscow Times reports.
But one thing is certain: even if the Russian president travels to Miami, he will not meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has expressed a clear desire to meet face-to-face with Putin.
“It is impossible,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told AFP in New Delhi on Saturday.
Moscow insisted that any meeting must happen in the Russian capital.
Not sure Russia is even going
Interfax reported that Peskov admitted, “We don’t know yet whether we’ll be going to Miami.”
Aide Yury Ushakov said attendance was not even discussed.
The refusal comes despite Washington pushing for progress. US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner recently visited both capitals, while Donald Trump called Putin directly.
Russia is present at another G20 meeting in Houston this week though, as Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has travelled to the US to attend the meeting.
This is the first time he has attended the meeting in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Demanding real results
In an interview with broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Zelensky made his stance clear. When asked if he would attend the Miami summit, he gave a direct answer: “Yes, of course.”
He stressed that action matters far more than posturing. “We have to come. We have to meet, to speak, and make decisions. It’s not about words. What I will tell him or what he wants to tell me, it doesn’t matter,” he said, citing “results” as key.
Zelensky feels his nation holds a stronger hand than last year. “That’s why we think that we have now (a) good position for negotiations,” he told Deutsche Welle, while pressing for air defense missiles.
He noted that Washington has the “political will to sell and to help, but the production is not too big.” He added that “all the Europeans who really support us have what we need.”
Only met once
Zelensky and Putin have only met in person once, back in 2019, the same year Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine.
The purpose of the meeting was to find a solution to the fighting going on in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region, where Russian separatists backed by Moscow were fighting against Ukrainian troops following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The then-chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, were also at the meeting, which led to some agreements between Russia and Ukraine, including implementing “all necessary ceasefire support measures.”
