Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with CNN Türk that he is ready to meet Vladimir Putin in Turkey. The Kremlin responded that the Ukrainian president can come to Moscow.
What Zelensky said
The interview was published on Sunday, 1 November. Zelensky stressed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has his own contacts with Putin, which is why Kyiv supports a meeting in Turkey. As media outlets including CNN Türk report, talks between delegations and technical teams, held in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, have produced some results, but the war continues.
“I do not think there is a problem we cannot solve when we, as leaders, show the will,” Zelensky said, according to the 1news.az agency. He added that he wants to meet “as a decision-maker.” According to the Clash Report portal, if Turkey organizes such a summit, Ukraine will welcome it. The same portal reports that Zelensky would like to agree at the meeting on a full ceasefire with a monitoring mechanism, and that Ukraine will not give up territories, including Crimea.
Kremlin’s reaction
Moscow did not respond directly to the proposal of a Turkish venue. On Sunday, Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov stated, according to TASS, which Clash Report cites, that Putin has never refused talks and that if Zelensky really wants to negotiate, he “can come” to Moscow. Ushakov and spokesman Dmitry Peskov also say that the first rounds should have a trilateral format with the participation of the US.
Kyiv had previously rejected many times the idea of travelling to Moscow, so the disagreement over venue and format remains the main obstacle. As of publication, the Kremlin had not directly addressed the idea of a meeting in Turkey.
Background: Istanbul and the trilateral format
The interview was preceded by Zelensky’s meeting with Erdoğan in Istanbul on Saturday. The Ukrainian president wrote on X that the talks mainly concerned the Black Sea. He later added that Ukraine is preparing a trilateral meeting – Ukraine, the US and Russia – in the first half of November.
According to Clash Report, both countries agreed to work on a Black Sea grain corridor, and Washington proposed Abu Dhabi as the venue for technical talks. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Sunday that Russia and Ukraine “must reach an agreement.”
Turkey has hosted talks between the two sides before. In May 2025, direct negotiations between delegations took place in Istanbul, but Putin did not attend in person; Russia was represented by Vladimir Medinsky. The talks ended with a prisoner exchange and no breakthrough. We wrote about those events, among other things, in our piece on the Trump–Zelensky meeting with no concrete progress.
What it means
For now this is a declaration, not an agreed date. There is no confirmation that Putin will agree to a meeting outside Russia or that a summit will take place. The realistic next event is the trilateral meeting announced for the first half of November, whose venue and participants have not been announced. For Poland it matters, because any ceasefire would affect the situation on NATO’s eastern border, as well as energy prices and the flow of refugees.
