breaks his promise and lowers the level of his chief negotiator in the Ukraine dialogue

Putin had promised the Republican that The Russian chief negotiator would not be a presidential advisor this year as in Istanbul (2025), sino a high position with greater decision-making capacity.

In this way, he chose the admiral Igor Kostiukov, head of Russian military intelligence, the feared GRUas chief negotiator in the first two rounds held in Abu Dhabi.

Instead, the Kremlin announced this Friday that Putin’s cultural advisor, Vladimir Medinsky, would once again lead the Russian delegation on February 17 and 18.

Although the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, would have expressed doubts about Russian participationMediski’s return is unexpected.

Medinsky’s election propagandist and former Minister of Culture obsessed with the revision of Russian history, It was already frowned upon by kyiv during the three rounds held in Istanbul last year.

Then, he rejected the possibility of a truce and recalled that Even Napoleon said that “war and negotiations take place simultaneously.”

“We fought against Sweden for 21 years. How long are you willing to fight?” Medinsky told the Ukrainians during the negotiations, alluding to what was known as the Great Northern War (1700-1721).

As a result, the Turkish-mediated negotiations only produced exchanges of prisoners of war and corpses.

On the other hand, in Geneva the Ukrainian negotiator will once again be Rustem Umérov and his delegation will include the head of the presidential office, Kirilo Budánov; the chief of the General Staff, Andrí Gnátov; the leader of the government parliamentary group, David Arajamia; the deputy foreign minister, Andrí Kislitsia, and the number two in military intelligence, Vadim Skibitski.

Russian anger at the White House?

The reason for the Kremlin’s decision is unknown, although since the last consultations in Abu Dhabi, Russian representatives have expressed their anger not so much with Ukraine, but with the White House.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovopenly criticized the Trump Administration for giving up on understandings reached during the August 2025 summit in Alaska.

When he talks about Anchorage “understandings”Moscow refers to the need for the Ukrainian Army to abandon Donbas, while Moscow would accept the freezing of the front in the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where kyiv controls a third of the territory.

“In Anchorage we accepted the US proposals. That is, if we approached the issue as men, they proposed and we accepted. The problem should have been solved,” said Lavrov.

The next step had to be, he explained, the normalization of economic cooperation, But “quite the opposite” has happened with “the war against oil tankers” of the so-called ‘ghost’ fleet and the sanctions on the two largest Russian oil companies: Lukoil and Rosneft.

To this must be added the pressure on Venezuela and India so that they do not sell and buy oil from Russia, and on Cuba so that it does not receive humanitarian supplies of crude oil from Moscow.

The previous two meetings held in the United Arab Emirates confirmed that the main obstacles to a settlement continue to be the territorial issue and security guarantees for Ukraine.

Zelensky insists on receiving guarantees before signing any peace agreement or calling elections, as Moscow and Washington demand.