On November 15, 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the G20 summit in Bali by video and laid out ten points. Nuclear safety, food security, energy security, the release of prisoners and deportees, restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, withdrawal of Russian troops, justice, protection from ecocide, preventing escalation, and a confirmed end to the war. “Ukraine should not be offered to compromise its conscience, sovereignty, territory, and independence,” he said.
Russia rejected it. Against this backdrop, the story of talks on the Russian invasion is largely a story of doors opening and closing.
The first rounds
Al Jazeera dates the first ceasefire talks to February 28, 2022, four days after the full-scale invasion began. Officials sat for about five hours and left with nothing; the two sides wanted incompatible things. Three more rounds in Belarus ended on March 7, again without result.
Diplomacy then moved to Turkey. On March 10, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Sergey Lavrov met in Antalya, their first encounter since the war began. Senior figures gathered in Istanbul later that month but could not agree a ceasefire.
Early April changed the mood. The discovery of massacres in Bucha and Irpin made talks harder still. Zelenskyy said negotiations would become “much more difficult,” and Putin told the world they had reached a “dead end.”
One agreement that held, for a while
The one tangible deal of that first year came in July 2022, again in Istanbul. Ukraine and Russia signed the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Turkey and the United Nations, opening a sea corridor for millions of tons of grain stuck in Ukrainian ports. Al Jazeera quotes the description of it as “the most significant diplomatic breakthrough for the first year of the war.”
It dealt with food, not borders. The harder questions never moved. At the time of the G20 plan, the territory Russia held was roughly one-fifth of Ukraine, and Moscow refused to give up any of it.
Summits without Moscow
Later efforts left Russia out of the room. In August 2023 Saudi Arabia hosted a summit in Jeddah, with delegates from 40 nations discussing Zelenskyy’s formula. Russia was not invited, and the Kremlin predicted failure. In June 2024 the Burgenstock resort in Switzerland hosted over 90 nations. Russia again stayed outside. India and Saudi Arabia declined to sign the final communique.
The pattern shifted in 2025. On August 15 Donald Trump met Putin in Alaska and no agreement came out of it. Trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi in January and February 2026 produced a 314-prisoner exchange and nothing on the political and security questions that matter most.
Sources
- Zelenskyy outlines Ukraine's 10-point "formula for peace" at G20
- Russia-Ukraine talks: All the mediation efforts, and where they stand
