Kyiv – The governments of Russia and Ukraine confirmed on Friday, February 17 and 18, that they will participate in a third round of US-brokered peace talks next week in Geneva. There have already been two rounds of talks this year under this tripartite format, held in Abu Dhabi, but next week’s session will be the first on European soil, and will come a few days earlier. Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine enters the fifth year.
Both sides have expressed no hope that the negotiations will lead to a comprehensive ceasefire agreement, but some progress has been made on other issues. Most notably, the two sides agreed to a temporary halt in attacks on energy infrastructure in late January, and then after the latest talks, first prisoner exchange in five months.
The fact that negotiations continued, with relative continuity in the groups sitting around the table, also suggested room for progress.
But there has been much to fuel doubts in Kiev since the discussions began.
Denys Shmyhal via Telegram/Handout/REUTERS 
President Trump said the suspension of strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure would last for a week. But it ended after just four days, when Russia hit Ukraine with a new strike of 450 drones and more than 60 missiles.
Free Press: Meet the Ukrainian refugees forced out of the US
Asked by reporters this week in Kyiv if future talks could at least lead to a more durable truce, even if it is still limited to strikes on power infrastructure, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “We have not received an answer from the Russians. To put it mildly, you could say the opposite – we received an answer from drones and missiles, that now they are not ready to stop their attacks.”
Felix Hahager/Picture Alliance/Getty 
The composition of the negotiating teams has also changed, which some analysts have seen as an indicator of potential progress on more technical issues.
At the two meetings in Abu Dhabi, the Ukrainian team included Kyrylo Budanov, the former head of military intelligence who now serves as Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, and the Russian delegation included Igor Kostyukov, head of the GRU military intelligence service.
“When the military meets with the military, they can move forward, they speak the same language,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of Strategic Industries, told CBS News last week. “Detailed measures and steps within security guarantees: militaries of both sides are fine to discuss.”
Next week in Geneva, however, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky will replace Kostyukov as head of the Russian delegation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
Medinsky led the Russian delegation to meetings with Ukrainian officials in Belarus and Istanbul in March 2022, which came to naught as his group made sweeping claims for occupied Ukrainian territory and demanded that Kyiv effectively relinquish sovereign military power. He is known for writing ultranationalist textbooks questioning Ukraine’s right to exist and for his close relationship with President Vladimir Putin.
Zelenskyy has it he said The Trump administration wants both sides to agree to an agreement to end the war by June. But in Kiev, officials doubt whether Washington is willing to put the kind of pressure on Moscow that would make that timeline feasible.
“Whether or not I think the war can end,” Zelenskyy told reporters this week, “doesn’t just depend on Ukraine. It also depends on the United States, which has to put pressure — forgive me for saying ‘must’, but there’s no other way — to put pressure on Russia.”