Russia and Ukraine met in Istanbul on July 23 for a third round of talks since face-to-face negotiations resumed in May. Expectations were low. Two previous rounds have yielded very few concrete results, apart from agreements on prisoner exchanges and the return of the bodies of soldiers killed in action.
The latest meeting was the shortest yet, lasting just 40 minutes. The negotiating teams were led by former Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov and Vladimir Medinsky, a senior aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin. They agreed on another exchange of prisoners and on setting up three working groups on political, military and humanitarian issues to engage online rather than in face-to-face meetings.
But if the talks have achieved very little, they have demonstrated two things. First, that the two sides remain very far apart on what they would consider acceptable terms for a ceasefire, let alone a peace agreement. And, second, that neither side is prepared to walk away from the negotiations, worried about incurring the wrath of the US president, Donald Trump.
A fourth round of negotiations has not been ruled out, but it is unlikely to involve either Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky, given that their negotiating positions still offer little hope of a deal ready to be signed at a leaders’ summit.
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The latest round of talks, however, took place in a different context to the earlier two meetings. Earlier in July, Trump set a deadline of 50 days, ending on September 2, for the fighting to stop.
After this if there’s no progress towards a ceasefire, the US president will consider imposing hefty secondary sanctions on Russia’s remaining trade partners. The aim would be to starve Moscow’s war economy of crucial foreign income, principally from heavily discounted sales of oil and gas to willing buyers including India and China.
The first ten days of this 50-day ultimatum have now passed. While the talks in Istanbul might be seen as a sign that Kyiv and Moscow are taking Trump seriously, the lack of tangible results suggests otherwise. There is no indication that either Russia or Ukraine have moved from their maximalist demands.
Russia keeps insisting on the recognition of its illegal occupation in Ukraine, on future limits to Ukraine’s military strength, and on a denial of the country’s accession to Nato. Ukraine meanwhile asks for its territory to be restored and its sovereignty – including its ability to determine its alliance arrangements – to be respected.
Playing for time
Developments on and around the battlefields in Ukraine don’t offer any signs that Moscow or Kyiv are ready even for a ceasefire either. Russia continues to make incremental gains along the 1,000km of frontlines in Ukraine.
It also keeps pounding Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv, with nightly drone and missile attacks. These have taken place at unprecedented scales of hundreds of drones that have repeatedly overwhelmed Ukraine’s already stretched air defence systems.
Yet, Ukraine has been buoyed by the promise of more US arms deliveries – paid for by other Nato allies – and the continuing commitments by its international partners to support the country. These include those made at the recent Nato summit in The Hague and the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome.
Add to that Trump’s apparent pivot away from Putin and his recently more constructive relationship with Zelensky, and it becomes clear why Kyiv – like Moscow – thinks that time is on its side.
Both may be proved wrong. Zelensky’s latest efforts to consolidate his power – a large-scale cabinet reshuffle and a decree to curb the independence of two of Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies – have caused alarm among EU officials in Brussels. More importantly, they have also triggered rare public protests against the government in Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, including Dnipro, Lviv and Odesa.
The protests may not get enough traction to pose a real danger to the government. But they indicate that support for Zelensky is not unconditional.
This is something that the Ukrainian president appeared to acknowledge when he outlined his plans to submit an additional bill to parliament to protect the independence of the embattled anti-corruption agencies. What is widely seen as a power grab by the president’s inner circle also has the potential of undermining public morale at a critical time in the war.
All of this also feeds into a Russian narrative of Zelensky as an illegitimate leader of his country who Russia cannot negotiate with. But it would be a mistake to assume that Russia can simply wait until Ukrainians are simply too exhausted to continue resisting Russia’s invasion or when western support will stop keeping Ukraine in the fight.
Even if Europeans become disillusioned with Zelensky, Russia’s war against Ukraine is too much of an existential question for European security that they will abandon Kyiv just because they do not agree with its anti-corruption policies.
It’s also not clear how long Russia can sustain the intensity of its ground and air campaigns against Ukraine or how long these will provide even the kinds of incremental gains that they currently achieve. Trump’s new plan for arming Ukraine by selling arms and ammunition to European Nato allies who would then deliver them to Kyiv is likely to blunt the effectiveness of the Russian air campaign and stymie its ground offensive.
So playing for time is unlikely to get either Moscow or Kyiv any closer to achieving their war aims. But preventing the other side’s victory – whether that’s on the battlefield or at the negotiation table – may well be enough for now for both Putin and Zelensky.
At the moment, continuing their war of attrition is the second-best solution that both presidents can agree on. The outcome of the third round of talks between their negotiators indicates that they may have reached such an implicit understanding already.
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Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU's Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
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