Chapter 1
Both governments say they are ready to talk
Both governments say they are ready to talk, and for most of 2026 that readiness has been all there was. The two delegations have not sat down with each other since February 2026, when a US-brokered round in Geneva broke up ten days before American strikes on Iran pulled Washington's attention elsewhere. What replaced direct talks is a shuttle: American envoys carrying proposals between the two capitals, with spokesmen, intermediaries and would-be hosts filling the space in between. The shuttle now reaches both capitals in person, and the distance between the two positions still has not measurably closed.
Chapter 2
The dispute is not over whether to negotiate but over what negotiating…
The dispute is not over whether to negotiate but over what negotiating would mean. Russia's conditions have been stable for two years and are restated whenever they are asked for: withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson they still hold; abandonment of NATO accession; and, in the Foreign Ministry's standing formula, elimination of the war's "root causes", which it defines as the alliance's eastward expansion and the rights of Russian speakers in territory Kyiv controls. In July 2026 Moscow hardened further, withdrawing an earlier offer to return occupied slivers of Sumy and Kharkiv. Ukraine's position is that a ceasefire should freeze the current front line and that any settlement needs security guarantees credible enough to survive it; Kyiv has said repeatedly that it will not cede territory it holds. Both sides therefore profess readiness while attaching conditions the other treats as surrender.
Chapter 3
As the principals have stalled
As the principals have stalled, the number of parties trying to convene them has grown. The United States runs the only channel both capitals acknowledge, through the envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — though the one instrument of pressure it has visibly applied this summer was applied to Kyiv, when Vice President JD Vance asked Ukraine to stop striking tankers at Novorossiysk and Ukraine stopped. Britain, France and Germany assembled a format of their own in August, less to mediate than to avoid being settled over, and their national security advisers have since taken seats inside the American round rather than beside it. Turkey has pressed for a maritime moratorium. Kazakhstan's president asked Putin in public to freeze the war. Beneath all of it runs a track of unofficial contacts — former officials meeting in Vienna and Baku under private convenors — which keeps a line open without committing anyone to anything.
Chapter 4
What remains unresolved is whether any of it converges
What remains unresolved is whether any of it converges. The narrower proposals — a mutual halt on attacks on Black Sea shipping, a moratorium on strikes against merchant vessels — test whether two sides that cannot agree a full settlement can agree a partial one, and both have been refused. The only partial measure either side has actually observed is a short, reciprocal pause on striking the other's capital while negotiators were in the room. Zelenskyy's claim that trilateral negotiations will be held in the autumn of 2026 stands on the record with a resolution date of 30 November, and no session with delegations from all three governments has convened since he made it. The question the record keeps returning to is the one Lavrov put plainly in August: not whether anyone will come, but what they will bring.
And now
Trump signed the Russia sanctions bill into law on September 18, after the House passed it 262–159 and the Senate 86–11. It authorises tariffs of up to 100 per cent on countries buying Russian oil and gas, and sanctions Russian officials, companies and banks. Named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, it is the first pressure instrument here to move from awaited to enacted. The week before, Trump wrote that Ukraine and Russia had each agreed to spare the other’s energy targets. A day later neither government had said so. Zelenskyy’s own position was conditional — Ukraine would de-escalate only if Washington first secured Russia’s ‘genuine readiness to end the war… on a long-term basis’ — and the Kremlin offered only that calls on Kyiv to stop ‘can only be welcomed’. Hours before, Ukraine had struck the TANECO refinery in Tatarstan. A trilateral round is being prepared for October and has not convened. Its scope is narrowing to energy and grain; Russia has rejected a ceasefire alongside the talks, and Putin will receive Zelenskyy only in Moscow. On September 18 Putin said Kyiv was doing ‘everything to ensure that there is no peace and no negotiations’.
Where it stands today →