Would Russia Accept an EU Envoy for Ukraine Talks?

On Sunday 25 October the Kremlin answered two open questions about Ukraine diplomacy on the same day. Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide, said Moscow will be ready to resume talks with Ukraine and the United States after 4 November. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Russia would support a European Union negotiator, on one condition. The EU has not named anyone.

Ushakov gave Vesti a start line for the trilateral round: after Russia’s National Unity Day on 4 November. He called the first meeting a “trial run”, as the Kyiv Independent reported. Peskov told TASS that Moscow would back an EU envoy who wants a peaceful settlement, and said Brussels is “only talking”. Putin told Vesti that Russia has always been blamed for unrest in Europe, said of the same governments whose envoy Peskov says Moscow would back. Silent Dossier found no on-the-record reply from a European government to Peskov’s offer by midday UTC.

Ushakov spoke to Vesti, a state broadcaster, on 25 October. The Kyiv Independent translated him as saying: “The next deadline is now Nov. 4, our major holiday. After that, we will be ready to resume negotiations.” He described the first session after the pause as a “trial run” and said a peace agreement “still needs work”, according to the same report.

Four days earlier, after Putin met the US envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg on 21 October, Ushakov said Russia was ready to resume the three-way format in mid-November, as Meduza reported. On the new approaches Witkoff carried from the EU and Kyiv, he said there “wasn’t all that much that was useful in them”. Volodymyr Zelensky said on 23 October that a new round was expected in the first half of November, with Abu Dhabi a possible venue, the Kyiv Independent reported.

The date has therefore moved from “mid-November” to “after 4 November”, inside the window both sides had already described.

Peskov’s comments to TASS on 25 October came in reply to reports that Finnish President Alexander Stubb could be proposed for the role. TASS carried him saying the EU “has long wanted” to appoint a negotiator “but either it cannot, or it cannot bring itself to do so”. He added that for now Europeans “are only talking” and not acting, and that the approach can hardly be called constructive. Russia would nonetheless support a negotiator provided the person genuinely wants to contribute to a peaceful settlement, Kyiv Post reported.

Two days earlier, on 23 October, Peskov had answered a question about European participation with “Nothing can be ruled out in advance”, as quoted in our report on the diesel deal.

Kyiv Post, citing The Telegraph, listed Stubb as one of five European leaders under consideration. It also reported that European Council President António Costa declined the role at a recent heads-of-state meeting and that German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul met resistance over a proposal to lead European diplomacy. Kyiv Post said the sources did not agree on who proposed the idea. A diplomatic source told The Telegraph: “There first needs to be a consensus that we need to negotiate with the Russians.”

Whether Stubb or any other leader is named before 4 November, and whether Peskov’s “genuinely” test is applied to that person in public. Whether the first trilateral meeting happens in Abu Dhabi in the first half of November, as Zelensky and Peskov have said, and whether it is the “trial run” Ushakov describes. Whether a European government answers Peskov on the record. The US midterm elections on 3 November, the day before Ushakov’s start line. Earlier coverage: what Witkoff took to St. Petersburg and whether Russia will resume the talks.