Russia's Vladimir Putin spurned a challenge to meet face-to-face with Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Turkey on Thursday, instead sending a second-tier delegation to planned peace talks, while Ukraine's president said his defence minister would head up Kyiv's team.
They will be the first direct talks between the sides since March 2022, but hopes of a major breakthrough were further dented by US President Donald Trump who said there would be no movement without a meeting between himself and Putin.
Zelenskiy said Putin's decision not to attend but to send what he called a "decorative" line-up showed the Russian leader was not serious about ending the war. Russia accused Ukraine of trying "to put on a show" around the talks.
It was not clear when the talks would actually begin.
"We can't be running around the world looking for Putin," Zelenskiy said after meeting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara.
"I feel disrespect from Russia. No meeting time, no agenda, no high-level delegation - this is personal disrespect. To Erdogan, to Trump," Zelenskiy told reporters.
Zelenskiy said he himself would also not now go to Istanbul and that his team's mandate was to discuss a ceasefire.
Ukraine backs an immediate, unconditional 30-day ceasefire but Putin has said he first wants to start talks at which the details of such a truce could be discussed. More than three years after its full-scale invasion, Russia has the advantage on the battlefield and says Ukraine could use a pause in the war to call up extra troops and acquire more Western weapons.
Both Trump and Putin have said for months they are keen to meet each other, but no date has been set. Trump, after piling heavy pressure on Ukraine and clashing with Zelenskiy in the Oval Office in February, has lately expressed growing impatience that Putin may be "tapping me along".
"Nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
The diplomatic disarray was symptomatic of the deep hostility between the warring sides and the unpredictability injected by Trump, whose interventions since returning to the White House in January have often provoked dismay from Ukraine and its European allies.
While Zelenskiy waited in vain for Putin in Ankara, the Russian negotiating team sat in Istanbul with no one to talk to on the Ukrainian side. Some 200 reporters milled around near the Dolmabahce Palace on the Bosphorus that the Russians had specified as the talks venue.
The enemies have been wrestling for months over the logistics of ceasefires and peace talks while trying to show Trump they are serious about trying to end what he calls "this stupid war".
Hundreds of thousands have been killed and wounded on both sides in the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two. Washington has threatened repeatedly to abandon its mediation efforts unless there is clear progress.
Trump said on Thursday he would go to the talks in Turkey on Friday if it was "appropriate".
"I just hope Russia and Ukraine are able to do something. It has to stop," he said.
Asked if Putin would join talks at some future point, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "What kind of participation will be required further, at what level, it is too early to say now."
Russia said on Thursday its forces had captured two more settlements in Ukraine's Donetsk region. A spokeswoman for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointedly reminded reporters of his comment last year that Ukraine was "getting smaller" in the absence of an agreement to stop fighting.
Once they start, the talks will have to address a chasm between the two sides over a host of issues.
The Russian delegation is headed by presidential adviser Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister who has overseen the rewriting of history textbooks to reflect Moscow's narrative on the war. It includes a deputy defence minister, a deputy foreign minister and the head of military intelligence.
Key members of the team, including its leader, were also involved in the last direct peace talks in Istanbul in March 2022 - and Medinsky confirmed on Thursday that Russia saw the new talks as a resumption of those interrupted three years ago.
Medinsky said the task was to achieve a long-lasting peace that included removing the "root causes" of the conflict - a phrase Zelenskiy said actually meant prolonging hostilities.
The terms under discussion in 2022, when Ukraine was still reeling from Russia's initial invasion, would be deeply disadvantageous to Kyiv. They included a demand by Moscow for deep cuts to the size of Ukraine's military.
With Russian forces now in control of close to a fifth of Ukraine, Putin has held fast to his longstanding demands for Kyiv to cede territory, abandon its NATO membership ambitions and become a neutral country.
Ukraine rejects these terms as tantamount to capitulation, and is seeking guarantees of its future security from world powers, especially the United States.
Highlighting the level of tension between Russia and the US-led alliance, Estonia said Moscow briefly sent a fighter jet into NATO airspace over the Baltic Sea during an attempt by the Estonian navy to stop a Russian-bound oil tanker thought to be part of a "shadow fleet" defying Western sanctions on Moscow.
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