Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia is ready to negotiate with Ukraine “on the basis of the Istanbul agreements.”

“Russia, as has been said many times, is ready for peace negotiations with Ukraine, ready on the basis of the agreements that were reached in Istanbul [in the spring of 2022] and, I would remind you, were initialed at the time by the Ukrainian delegation, which means everything suited them,” Putin said.

Talks in Istanbul took place in the early months of the full-scale war in 2022. They produced a draft peace agreement under which Ukraine would renounce its bid to join NATO and limit the size of its armed forces in exchange for security guarantees (the draft was leaked to the press two years later). Crimea would have remained de facto under Russian control, while the fate of the occupied parts of Donbas, the document stipulated, was to be decided later in talks between Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The 2022 Istanbul talks took place before Russia announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions and enshrined them in its Constitution. Despite this, Russian officials — including Putin himself in 2024 and later — have said Moscow is ready to negotiate “on the basis of the Istanbul agreements.”

Over the past year, Moscow has instead demanded that Kyiv negotiate “on the basis of Anchorage,” referring to Putin’s meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska. In Moscow, that meeting was interpreted as de facto U.S. acceptance that Russia would receive the entirety of the annexed regions — including areas not under the control of the Russian military.