Zelenskyy: Ukraine Ready to Hold New Round of Trilateral Talks in Azerbaijan

Ukraine is ready to hold a new round of negotiations with Russia in Azerbaijan, said Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a joint press statement with the President of Ilham Aliyev.

This was reported by Radio Svoboda.

“We (with Aliyev – ed.) discussed peace efforts for Ukraine. It is important that Russia finds the strength within itself to end this war,” Zelenskyy said.

The President stressed that Ukraine “highly values” the role of partners in mediating the negotiation process.

“I shared with the President of Azerbaijan that we are ready for trilateral negotiations. We have held such talks in Turkey and Switzerland. We are ready for such negotiations in Azerbaijan if Russia is ready for diplomacy,” the President added.

Earlier, in a comment to CNN, Zelenskyy said that although technical negotiations with the United States are still ongoing, he “does not see the possibility of meeting… until the issue is resolved, the Iran matter.”

Zelenskyy noted that the “challenge” is that the same U.S. negotiating team — led by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and the son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner — is handling negotiations on both the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine.

He said that it is not acceptable to say, “we will talk about Ukraine a bit later… Ukraine is not ‘a bit later’. Ukraine is already experiencing such a major tragedy, and we must find a way to address this in parallel.”

Zelenskyy also noted that six cooperation documents were signed in Azerbaijan. In particular, the documents concern security and the defence-industrial complex; details will be released later, he added during a press conference with the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.

During January and February, several rounds of trilateral meetings between Ukraine, the United States, and Russia took place regarding an end to the war. No specific results were announced. However, following the meeting on February 5, the delegations reached an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war — the first in the past five months.

Due to the escalation of the situation in the Middle East, the trilateral negotiations between Ukraine, the United States, and Russia were postponed indefinitely. At the same time, the President of Ukraine stated that he does not consider these talks to be at an impasse.

In an interview with Reuters published on the evening of March 25, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the United States had set a condition requiring Ukraine to withdraw its troops from Donbas in order to receive U.S. security guarantees.

Special representative of the Russian president, Kirill Dmitriev, expressed satisfaction that Zelenskyy “finally understood that the U.S. will only provide security guarantees to Ukraine if Ukraine leaves Donbas.” Dmitriev said that Zelenskyy’s comment “cannot but be pleasing.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Zelenskyy’s claims false. In response, the President of Ukraine said that he had shown “a smaller part of the iceberg.”

EMPR