Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that future talks on a settlement of the war in Ukraine should focus on security guarantees for both countries and on an overall framework for security throughout Europe, Reuters reported. Putin, interviewed on Russian television a day after meeting US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, confirmed that Russia was ready to resume US-mediated talks with Ukraine next month.

Source: Reuters

"The goal of these talks will be to ensure the security of Ukraine and Russia after reaching peace agreements, in their final form, not as a result of a temporary ceasefire for some short period of time. We are ready to resume these contacts to achieve this goal," Putin said. He added that Witkoff had also stressed that discussions had to extend to "the architecture of European security as a whole. And I agree with that too. Well, let's see how things develop in the coming days."

Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday that Putin had agreed in principle to resume three-way negotiations involving Russia, the United States and Ukraine after November 10, a week after the US midterm elections, the Associated Press reported. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who met Witkoff in Norway on Tuesday, said Ukraine was ready for talks likely to take place by early next month, and that Ukraine supported "any proposals for a ceasefire, an end to the war, an energy ceasefire as well as humanitarian initiatives".

Source: Associated Press

Efforts headed by the United States to pursue talks stalled in February with the outbreak of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, Reuters noted. Many of the war's hardest issues focus on territory: Russia is demanding that Ukraine cede all of eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, while Kyiv rejects any notion of giving up land it currently holds.

Putin also restated longstanding Kremlin policy that Russia never wanted to launch a war but had run into hostile reactions from Ukraine on key issues of concern to Moscow — a claim Kyiv and its Western partners dispute, pointing to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.