Ukrainian Delegation Asks Russia for Putin-Zelensky Talks

"The Ukrainian side has requested direct negotiations between the two leaders. We have taken notice of this," Russia’s chief negotiator said

ISTANBUL, May 16. /TASS/. The Ukrainian delegation has requested direct negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, and Moscow has taken note of this request, Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s chief negotiator, told reporters.

"The Ukrainian side has requested direct negotiations between the two leaders. We have taken notice of this," Medinsky said, following a meeting with Ukrainian negotiators.

Earlier on Friday, Istanbul hosted direct talks between Russia and Ukraine, their first since 2022. Before those, the United States, Turkey, and Ukraine held a trilateral meeting, and Medinsky met with the US side.

Speaking of being "dishonest", the link you have provided in no way substantiates your claim that Putin wants to annex Ukraine. It is a history lesson.....a factual one......on the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. You have taken this document and superimposed it on the current conflict and drawn the conclusion yourself that this is what is driving the war. You then, with a wave of the hand, decree that anyone who disagrees......"is either fooling himself or is being dishonest." Such thinking demands certain presuppositions about Russia which I'm guessing are Cold War -derived but are never mentioned.

The poster is correct. Putin has never said he wants all of Ukraine. You are extrapolating from the linked document and the historical closeness of the two countries to attribute a cause for the current conflict. To support your thesis, you also need to dismiss any other possible current causes which don't require your pet document to explain the present situation. So we get...."Notice how Putin insists that we need to address the "root causes" but never explains what those are."

How convenient. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention or more likely, you simply dismiss the causes which have been enumerated numerous times and which date back a decade or more. You're right about one thing, though; Ukraine is a "vassal state". It's a vassal state of a godless, globalist West where the violation of God's moral law and the Natural Law have been decreed fundamental. "Ukrainian independence" is a fiction. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and now Roumania are finding out just how "independent" they are. Ukraine is a proxy in the war between NATO and Russia. A war that began well before 2022. You want to tell us that if and when Ukraine joins NATO and the EU it will be "independent"? Is that the shtick you're selling? It will be a slave. A slave of a culture and a political system where fascists police "hate crimes", "hate speech" "diversity" and transgender "rights". Imagine being a "vassal state" of Russia. There'd be none of those things. How awful would that be?

Here's another possible explanation which you might want to consider; current events were a trigger which, because of the historical closeness of the two nations (see your link) and their geographical proximity and the significant number of Russian speakers in Ukraine, caused Russia to act. To portray this as a simple land grab by an imperialist power which seeks to rule the world is lazy and yes, "dishonest".

You have obviously not read what Putin wrote or refuse to acknowledge its significance.

During the recent Direct Line, when I was asked about Russian-Ukrainian relations, I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole. These words were not driven by some short-term considerations or prompted by the current political context. It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe. I therefore feel it necessary to explain my position in detail and share my assessments of today’s situation.
First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply has been known from time immemorial – divide and rule. There is nothing new here. Hence the attempts to play on the “national question” and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another. …
The Russian state incorporated the city of Kiev and the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper River, including Poltava region, Chernigov region, and Zaporozhye. Their inhabitants were reunited with the main part of the Russian Orthodox people. These territories were referred to as “Malorossia” (Little Russia). …
I am not going to idealise anything. We do know there were the Valuev Circular of 1863 an then the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which restricted the publication and importation of religious and socio-political literature in the Ukrainian language. But it is important to be mindful of the historical context. These decisions were taken against the backdrop of dramatic events in Poland and the desire of the leaders of the Polish national movement to exploit the “Ukrainian issue” to their own advantage. I should add that works of fiction, books of Ukrainian poetry and folk songs continued to be published. There is objective evidence that the Russian Empire was witnessing an active process of development of the Malorussian cultural identity within the greater Russian nation, which united the Velikorussians, the Malorussians and the Belorussians.
At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim that the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not. Such “hypotheses” became increasingly used for political purposes as a tool of rivalry between European states. …
In 1922, when the USSR was created, with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic becoming one of its founders, a rather fierce debate among the Bolshevik leaders resulted in the implementation of Lenin's plan to form a union state as a federation of equal republics. The right for the republics to freely secede from the Union was included in the text of the Declaration on the Creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and, subsequently, in the 1924 USSR Constitution. By doing so, the authors planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time bomb, which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the leading role of the CPSU was gone, the party itself collapsing from within. A “parade of sovereignties” followed. …
Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia. To make sure of that, it is enough to look at the boundaries of the lands reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and the territory of the Ukrainian SSR when it left the Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.…
Of course, inside the USSR, borders between republics were never seen as state borders; they were nominal within a single country, which, while featuring all the attributes of a federation, was highly centralized – this, again, was secured by the CPSU's leading role. But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland. …
When the USSR collapsed, many people in Russia and Ukraine sincerely believed and assumed that our close cultural, spiritual and economic ties would certainly last, as would the commonality of our people, who had always had a sense of unity at their core. However, events – at first gradually, and then more rapidly – started to move in a different direction.
In essence, Ukraine's ruling circles decided to justify their country's independence through the denial of its past, however, except for border issues. They began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation. The common tragedy of collectivization and famine of the early 1930s was portrayed as the genocide of the Ukrainian people. …
There may be an argument: if you are talking about a single large nation, a triune nation, then what difference does it make who people consider themselves to be – Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians. I completely agree with this. Especially since the determination of nationality, particularly in mixed families, is the right of every individual, free to make his or her own choice. …
I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.

The constant theme here is that Ukraine and Russia are one, that idea of a separate and independent Ukrainian nation is the artificial product of the anti-Russian west and Ukrainian intellectual elite, not the true sentiment of the Ukrainian people. And this has to be read in the light of Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics:

Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has neither a particular cultural message of universal significance, nor geographical uniqueness, nor ethnic exclusivity. … Of course, Ukrainian culture and language are peculiar and unique, but they are deprived of any universal significance. Cossack settlements that formed, to a large extent,Ukrainian ethnic group, distinguished by independence, a special ethical, economic and social structure. But all these elements are not enough for geopolitical independence, and the popamic map of Ukraine, where the main rivers (Dniester, Dnieper, etc.) flow parallel to each other, explains the slow development of Ukrainian statehood.
For this reason, the independent existence of Ukraine (especially within its modern borders) can only make sense as a “sanitary cordon,” since elements opposite in their geopolitical orientation will not allow this country to fully join either the eastern or western bloc, i.e. neither to Russia-Eurasia, nor to Central Europe. All this dooms Ukraine to a puppet existence and geopolitical service of the thalassocratic strategy in Europe. In this sense, the role of Ukraine is similar to the role of the Baltic republics. On this basis, at one time, seriously discussed the project of creating the "Black Sea-Baltic Federation", i.e. a typical “sanitary cordon” of subversive geopolitical formation, which serves to provoke instability in Eastern Europe and to prepare the prerequisites for a series of armed conflicts.The existence of Ukraine within its current borders and with the current status of a “sovereign state” is identical to delivering a monstrous blow to Russia's geopolitical security, which is tantamount to an invasion of its territory.
This territory should be divided into several zones corresponding to the gamut of geopolitical and ethnocultural realities.
The Ukrainian factor is the most vulnerable spot in the western zone of Russia. If in other places the danger of the destruction of heartland’s geopolitical viability is potential, and the positional struggle for the Eurasian geopolitical system sets only preventive goals, then the existence of a “sovereign Ukraine” is at a geopolitical level a declaration of a geopolitical war in Russia (and this is not so much Ukraine itself, how much Atlantism and Sea Power). The point is not that Ukraine itself consciously chooses the role of the atlantist “sanitary cordon”, although in some cases this cannot but be a deliberate step, but that in practice it begins to fulfill this role, as long as it does not actively engage in integration processes with Moscow or (at least) does not break up into separate geopolitical components.

This is the ideology that is driving this war, whether you want to accept it or not.

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