Both governments say they are ready to talk. Neither has sat down with the other since February 2026, when a US-brokered round in Geneva broke up ten days before American strikes on Iran pulled Washington's attention elsewhere. Everything since has been conducted at one remove — through envoys, spokesmen, intermediaries and would-be hosts — and the distance between the two positions has not measurably closed.

The dispute is not over whether to negotiate but over what negotiating would mean. Russia's conditions have been stable for two years and are restated whenever they are asked for: withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson they still hold; abandonment of NATO accession; and, in the Foreign Ministry's standing formula, elimination of the war's "root causes", which it defines as the alliance's eastward expansion and the rights of Russian speakers in territory Kyiv controls. In July 2026 Moscow hardened further, withdrawing an earlier offer to return occupied slivers of Sumy and Kharkiv. Ukraine's position is that a ceasefire should freeze the current front line and that any settlement needs security guarantees credible enough to survive it; Kyiv has said repeatedly that it will not cede territory it holds. Both sides therefore profess readiness while attaching conditions the other treats as surrender.

As the principals have stalled, the number of parties trying to convene them has grown. The United States runs the only channel both capitals acknowledge, through the envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — though the one instrument of pressure it has visibly applied this summer was applied to Kyiv, when Vice President JD Vance asked Ukraine to stop striking tankers at Novorossiysk and Ukraine stopped. Turkey has pressed for a maritime moratorium. Kazakhstan's president asked Putin in public to freeze the war. Britain, France and Germany have begun assembling a format of their own, less to mediate than to avoid being settled over. Beneath all of it runs a track of unofficial contacts — former officials meeting in Vienna and Baku under private convenors — which keeps a line open without committing anyone to anything.

What remains unresolved is whether any of it converges. The narrower proposals — a mutual halt on attacks on Black Sea shipping, a moratorium on strikes against merchant vessels — test whether two sides that cannot agree a full settlement can agree a partial one, and so far both have been refused. Zelenskyy's claim that trilateral negotiations will be held in the autumn of 2026 stands on the record with a resolution date of 30 November, and no session with delegations from all three governments has convened since he made it. The question the record keeps returning to is the one Lavrov put plainly in August: not whether anyone will come, but what they will bring.