Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he will personally try to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend face-to-face peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul on Thursday.
Russia and Brazil are economic partners through their membership of the BRICS group, and Lula recently attended the Victory Day parade in Moscow—where he is now headed again after a trip to China.
“I’ll try to talk to Putin,” Lula told a press conference in Beijing before he set off for Moscow, AFP reported. “It costs me nothing to say, ‘hey, comrade Putin, go to Istanbul and negotiate, dammit’.”
Zelensky has said he will be in Turkey, ready and waiting, for direct talks with Putin to end the war. U.S. President Donald Trump has also called for Putin and Zelensky to meet there, and said he was thinking of attending himself, too, if it was possible.
Trump is in the middle of a four-day tour of the Middle East with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.
But the Kremlin has not yet said if Putin has agreed to attend the talks in Istanbul. Even without Putin, if delegations from Russia and Ukraine meet, it will be the first set of direct talks between the two sides in more than three years.
The Ukrainians have framed Zelensky’s proposal for face-to-face talks as a test of Putin’s true commitment to negotiating peace, and called for its allies to impose even tougher sanctions on Russia if he does not attend.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to stop Kyiv’s deepening ties with the West, in particular its progress towards membership of NATO, which Moscow says is a red line and an intolerable security threat.
But the Western world widely views the invasion as an imperial war of aggression to take control of Ukraine, and has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia as a result, as well as supported Kyiv in its defense against Moscow, largely through U.S. military aid.
This is a developing article and more information will be added soon.
The post Brazil’s Lula Tells Putin: ‘Go to Istanbul and Negotiate, Dammit’ appeared first on Newsweek.
