Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed Russia’s pledge to drastically cut back its military activity in northern Ukraine, saying “Ukrainians are not naive people” and vowing to continue defensive military efforts.
Zelenskiy said in a video address early on Wednesday: “Ukrainians have already learned during these 34 days of invasion and over the past eight years of the war in Donbas that only a concrete result can be trusted.”
Russia’s deputy defence minister Alexander Fomin said after talks in Istanbul on Tuesday that Moscow wanted to “increase mutual trust, create the right conditions for future negotiations and reach the final aim of signing a peace deal with Ukraine”, and that the Kremlin would “radically reduce military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv”.
Ukraine’s president said that while there had been “positive” signals from the latest talks, “they do not drown out the explosions of Russian shells”. “The enemy is still in our territory,” he said. “The shelling of our cities continues. Mariupol is blocked. Missile and airstrikes do not stop. This is the reality. These are the facts.”
Ukraine’s general staff of the armed forces said in its latest intelligence report on Tuesday night that Russian troops continued to withdraw from the territory of Kyiv and Chernihiv but the movement is merely “a rotation of individual units” and aims to “mislead the military leadership” of Ukraine.
The scepticism echoes that of experts and western diplomats and leaders, who expressed doubts that the move was more than a ploy to dress up setbacks on the ground.
An unconvinced Joe Biden said: “We’ll see. I don’t read anything into it until I see what their actions are.”
While Moscow presented its move as a goodwill gesture, it came as Russia’s advance appeared to have stalled on several fronts, with the Kremlin’s forces thwarted by stiff Ukrainian resistance, heavy losses and logistical and tactical failings.
Having failed to seize the Ukrainian capital and force an early capitulation, Moscow said last week it was shifting its focus to expanding the territory held by pro-Russia separatists in the eastern Donbas region. The defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said hours before the talks the “main goal” was now the “liberation” of Donbas.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said he had not seen anything indicating that talks were progressing in a “constructive way” and suggested Russian indications of a pullback could be an attempt by Moscow to “deceive people and deflect attention”.
Speaking on a visit to Morocco, Blinken said that there was “what Russia says, and what Russia does, and we’re focused on the latter. What Russia is doing is the continued brutalisation of Ukraine.”
A spokesperson for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, said the UK had seen signs of “some reduction” in Russian bombardment around Kyiv, but added: “We will judge Putin and his regime by his actions, not by his words … We don’t want to see anything less than a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory.”
The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) said in its latest updated that “it is almost certain that the Russian offensive has failed in its objective to encircle Kyiv”. The UK defence attaché Mick Smeath in a statement: “Russian statements regarding a reduction in activity around Kyiv, and reporting indicating the withdrawal of some Russian units from these areas, may indicate Russia’s acceptance that it has now lost the initiative in the region.” He added: “It is highly likely that Russia will seek to divert combat power from the north to their offensive in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east.”
Western officials were “very wary” about the promises, saying the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, could be temporising. “Certainly in terms of the negotiations, nothing that we have seen so far has demonstrated to us that Putin and his colleagues are particularly serious,” one said. “It’s more of a tactical exercise in playing for time.”
John Kirby, press secretary at the Pentagon, warned against “fooling ourselves” over the Kremlin’s claims. “Has there been some movement by some Russian units away from Kyiv in the last day or so? Yeah, we think so, small numbers,” he said. “But we believe that this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine.”
Ukraine presented Russian negotiators in Istanbul with a framework for peace under which it would remain neutral with its security guaranteed by third-party countries including the US, the UK, France, Turkey, China and Poland, in an arrangement similar to Nato’s article 5, which commits members to defend one another.
It also said it would be willing to agree to a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, with both countries agreeing not to use their militaries to resolve the issue in the meantime, and called for Russia to drop its objection to Ukrainian membership of the EU.
The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said “both sides are getting closer at every stage”, adding that the Istanbul talks could lead in the first instance to a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers.
However, analysts warned that the demands were unlikely to be readily accepted by the Kremlin. “I would be very careful about getting too optimistic. We have only heard the Ukrainian proposals. We need to wait for Russia’s responses,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre.
Gabuev said Kyiv’s proposals “would look like a loss to Putin, who in his mind already settled the Crimean question a long time ago”. Russia’s military pullback “could just be a temporary strategic move”, he added.
The senior Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak described Kyiv’s proposal on guaranteed neutrality as “an effective tool for protecting our territory and sovereignty”, with “the leading armies of the world becoming guarantors and assuming specific legal obligations” to intervene in the event of aggression.
The proposal on Crimea was also “revolutionary”, Podolyak said, not only because it meant “the return of the topic of Crimea to the negotiating agenda” but because it would “allow us to preserve the current legal interpretations of Crimea, since Crimea is, of course, a part of Ukraine for us”.
Even as the peace negotiators began their work, however, Zelenskiy, said in a speech to the Danish parliament that at least seven people had been killed and 22 injured in a Russian strike on a regional government building in the southern port of Mykolaiv. “People are still going through the rubble,” he said.
Zelenskiy also called the Russian bombardment and siege of the port city of Mariupol, where local officials have said at least 5,000 people have died, a “crime against humanity … happening in front of the eyes of the whole planet, in real time”.
Russia’s foreign ministry said in a Telegram post on Tuesday night that Putin had told Emmanuel Macron in a phone call that “Ukrainian nationalist militants” in Mariupol must lay down their weapons in order to resolve the humanitarian crisis there.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February, has killed an estimated 20,000 people, forced more than 10 million from their homes – including more than 3.8 million who have fled the country – and triggered an unprecedented range of western economic sanctions against Russia.