Putin proposes direct Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul on May 15

May 11, 2025
radmin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on May 15, “without preconditions” to achieve “lasting peace” and “eliminate the root causes” of the three-year conflict.

The offer, delivered early on Sunday, came hours after the leaders of Ukraine, France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom called for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire to start on Monday.

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The leaders, who were meeting in Kyiv, said their call is backed by United States President Donald Trump and threatened “massive” new sanctions on Moscow if it did not agree with their plan.

Putin did not explicitly address that call in his comments, but slammed European “ultimatums” and “anti-Russian rhetoric” before outlining the counter-proposal for renewed Russia-Ukraine negotiations.

“We are proposing that Kyiv resume direct negotiations without any preconditions,” the Russian president told reporters. “We offer the Kyiv authorities to resume negotiations already on Thursday, in Istanbul.”

Putin said that he would speak to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later on Sunday about facilitating the talks.

There was no immediate response from Ukraine to the proposal.

But Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously said he was ready for peace talks, but only after a ceasefire is in place.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, has left hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and triggered the gravest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held direct talks in Istanbul in the first weeks of the conflict, but failed to agree to halt the fighting.

Putin said Russia was proposing restarting the talks in an attempt to “eliminate the root causes of the conflict” and “to achieve the restoration of a long-term, lasting peace” rather than simply a pause for rearmament.

“We do not exclude that during these talks we will be able to agree on some new ceasefire,” he added.

Putin, whose forces have advanced over the past year, has faced increased public and private pressure from Trump as well as warnings from European powers to end the war.

But he has offered few concessions and has stood firm in his conditions for ending the war.

In June 2024, Putin said Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia.

Russian officials have also proposed that the US recognise Russia’s control over about one-fifth of Ukraine and demanded that Ukraine remain neutral, though Moscow has said it is not opposed to Kyiv’s ambitions to join the European Union.

Putin specifically mentioned the 2022 draft deal from the talks in Istanbul.

Under that draft, Ukraine should agree to permanent neutrality in return for international security guarantees from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: China, France, Russia, the UK and the US.

“It was not Russia that broke off negotiations in 2022. It was Kyiv,” Putin said. “Russia is ready to negotiate without any preconditions.”

He thanked China, Brazil, African and Middle Eastern countries and the US for their efforts to mediate.

Russia, Putin added, had proposed several ceasefires, including a moratorium on striking energy facilities, an Easter ceasefire, and most recently, the 72-hour truce during the celebrations marking 80 years since victory in World War II, but accused Ukraine of repeatedly violating the ceasefires.

He said that during the May ceasefire, Ukraine had attacked Russia with 524 aerial drones, 45 sea drones, a number of Western missiles and that Russia had repelled five attacks on Russian regions.

Ukraine, too, has accused Russia of repeatedly violating its own ceasefire.

Earlier on Saturday, for the first time, the leaders of France, Germany, Poland and the UK travelled together to Ukraine in a visit that Zelenskyy said sent “a very important signal”.

The five leaders, following their meeting in Kyiv, issued a statement calling for a ceasefire “lasting at least 30 days” from Monday, to make room for a diplomatic push to end the war.

“An unconditional ceasefire by definition cannot be subject to any conditions. If Russia calls for such conditions, this can only be considered as an effort to prolong the war and undermine diplomacy,” the statement read.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the US would take the lead in monitoring the proposed ceasefire, with support from European countries, and threatened “massive sanctions … prepared and coordinated between Europeans and Americans” should Russia violate the truce.

Meanwhile, retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, said Saturday that a “comprehensive” 30-day ceasefire, covering attacks from the air, land, sea and on infrastructure, “will start the process for ending the largest and longest war in Europe since World War II”.

Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath” of the Ukraine war, which his administration casts as a proxy war between the US and Russia.

Former US President Joe Biden, Western European leaders and Ukraine cast the invasion as an imperial-style land grab and repeatedly pledged to defeat Russian forces.

Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in Moscow’s relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.

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WAPA Board Extends 2025 Budget, Expects Continued Deficit in 2026

The V.I. Water and Power Authority’s governing board failed to adopt an operating budget for the coming fiscal year Monday, opting instead to temporarily extend the current year’s budget plan amid board members’ concerns about the utility’s continued deficit.
The vote to extend this year’s budget came after a failed motion by member Maurice Muia to table the matter and the board’s subsequent failed attempt to adopt the 2026 budget. Members Cheryl Boynes-Jackson and Kyle Fleming voted in favor, and members Hubert Turnbull and Muia voted against. WAPA’s chief executive, Karl Knight, noted in response that “there’s not much for me to work on.”
“I’ve presented a very realistic spending plan that captures what I believe is public knowledge: that the authority still has its fiscal challenges and does not collect sufficient revenues through its rates to cover full operating expenses — as catalogued in our presentation today,” he said, adding that the fiscal picture improves once federal reimbursements are taken into account. “But… certainly, the management team remains at the whim of the board to reconvene to discuss this item at the board’s choosing.”
During Monday’s board meeting, which was rescheduled after a cancellation last Thursday, WAPA Chief Financial Officer Lorraine Kelly told board members that the 2026 budget anticipates $287.2 million in electric revenues at a cost of $313.9 million. Water revenues are expected to bring in $38 million against $34.1 million in outflow. Asked to describe other projected costs, Kelly listed: advertising and promotions; engineering services; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expenses; legal fees; maintenance; materials and supplies; office supplies; and others.
“And the total of that has a magnitude of approximately $26.1 million,” she said, which currently amounts to seven percent of the utility’s budget.
After the board failed to adopt the 2026 budget and before it voted to extend the utility’s current one, Knight reported that WAPA’s deficit is shrinking.
“Our rates do not cover our full expenses as a utility,” he said. “That has not changed with this budget proposal, although the budget deficit has shrunk by more than 50 percent since the beginning of the last fiscal year. So the budget deficit is closing, but there’s still some work to be done.”
After adjustments, he said, the deficit could be around $18.4 million.
“It doesn’t change our revenue forecast,” he said. “What it does mean is that some of the funding gap can be filled with federal dollars, whereas when we began the process of drafting the budget… those approvals had not yet been received, and so the budget — conservatively — was drafted without the anticipation of those budget approvals. Now that those are realized, that allows us to shrink what we had forecasted as a potential shortfall.”
During Monday’s meeting, the board also approved a largely federally-funded $864,550 trio of seawater intake screens to mitigate the impact of sargassum on St. Croix, an up to $16 million, two-year contract for debris removal and disposal with Hoagland VI, and a $225,000, six-month extension with West Peak Energy for work on the utility’s Wartsila generators.
Maxwell George, WAPA’s director of project management, said the extension was needed as the utility is “slowly getting to confident that we’ll be getting the Wartsilas back next month.”
The board also voted to close out advertising a request for qualifications to provide liquid propane gas for the Randolph Harley and Richmond power plants on St. Thomas and St. Croix, respectively.
Knight said the utility’s evaluation committee “is of the opinion that the solicitation process failed to meet the objectives of the RFP, and so that is their recommendation — that we close out the process with no award being made.”

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