On the banks of the Bosphorus, in front of the luxurious Dolmabahçe Palace, journalists awaited the start of negotiations while locals hurried to the nearby maritime station. These parallel lives were as oblivious to each other as Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday, May 15. Unsurprisingly, the Russian president refused to respond to the challenge posed by his Ukrainian counterpart for a meeting in Istanbul to initiate direct negotiations, three years after Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian president "has no plans for the moment" to travel to Turkey, his spokesperson said from the Kremlin. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators also avoided each other throughout the day. On Friday, each party was to meet with Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, and Turkey's foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, without any broader meeting planned at this stage. According to members of both delegations, there was still uncertainty on Thursday evening about the exact modalities of these trilateral exchanges.

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