Vladimir Putin will not travel to Turkey and is instead sending the deputy foreign affairs and defence ministers, the head of his military intelligence, and the presidential aide, who will lead the delegation, the Kremlin announced late on Wednesday.
ADVERTISEMENTRussian President Vladimir Putin will not travel to Istanbul on Thursday to meet his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to the Kremlin.
Late Wednesday evening, the Kremlin finally announced who would represent Moscow at what was supposed to be the first direct talks between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia.
The Russian delegation will be led by Putin's presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who represented Moscow at the first attempt at talks in Istanbul in March 2022.
Apart from Medinsky, Russia will be represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin, Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin and Igor Kostyukov, the head of Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU).
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will not be travelling to Turkey either.
Moscow waited until the end of the day on Wednesday to announce who would attend the Istanbul talks with Ukraine.
Over the past weekend, Putin suggested that Russia and Ukraine should sit down for direct talks. Ukraine’s president promptly responded that he would travel to Istanbul himself to meet with Putin for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
In his evening address on Wednesday, released before the Kremlin announced the delegation line-up, Zelenskyy said he was waiting for the final list before deciding on Ukraine’s course of action.
Ukraine’s president said Kyiv had several meetings regarding the format of the meeting in Turkey, adding, "I am waiting to see who will come from Russia, and then I will determine what steps Ukraine should take. So far, their signals in the media are unconvincing."
US President Donald Trump said over the past few days that he was considering coming to Istanbul to attend the meeting. Zelenskyy said the presence of the US president could be "the strongest argument".
“A week can really change a lot – but it may not. Right now, all of this is being decided," he stated before the Kremlin announced its delegation.
Earlier, Trump said the US may introduce additional, tougher sanctions against Moscow if it doesn’t reach an agreement with Kyiv to put an end to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Who is Vladimir Medinsky?
Putin’s aide Medinsky is a fierce supporter of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In January 2025 he was the editor of a new textbook "Military History of Russia" which frames Moscow’s war against Ukraine as a continuation of the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany and describes Russia’s war as "necessary reaction to Western threats."
Aimed at schoolchildren, the book claims Russia was "forced" to invade Ukraine in February 2022 over NATO’s expansion policy and the 2014 ousting of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, which it labelled "a Western-backed coup".
The three-volume book calls Ukraine an "aggressive anti-Russian bridgehead" and emphasises "battlefield heroism" while pointing at historic parallels between modern Russian military tactics and those of the Soviet army during World War II, which Russia calls "the Great Patriotic War".
In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, Medinsky, then Russia’s culture minister, issued a document declaring that "Russia is not Europe," arguing that the rest of the continent was morally inferior.
This wasn’t the first time Medinsky tried to demonstrate Russia’s superiority to other nations. In 2013, he said that Russia’s "perseverance" in the face of all 20th-century catastrophes indicates that the Russian people "have an extra chromosome".