{"id":488039,"date":"2026-06-07T20:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T20:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/488039\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T20:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T20:52:11","slug":"zelenskiy-asked-roman-abramovich-to-convey-message-to-putin-about-peace-talks-reports-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/488039\/","title":{"rendered":"Zelenskiy asked Roman Abramovich to convey message to Putin about peace talks \u2013 reports \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy<\/a> invited former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich<\/a> to Kyiv last month in a failed attempt to convince Russian president Vladimir Putin<\/a> to hold direct peace talks, according to four people familiar with the matter. <\/p>\n

Zelenskiy asked Abramovich to pass on a message to the Russian president that he was prepared to meet for what would have been their first bilateral summit more than four years into Moscow\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine<\/a>, the people said. <\/p>\n

Ukraine wanted to demonstrate its seriousness about holding direct peace talks with Russia, even as the US, which has sought to broker a ceasefire, is distracted by the war in the Middle East, they added. Kyiv hopes its success in halting Russia\u2019s offensive, which has slowed to a crawl in recent months as its forces sustain enormous casualties, and inflicting damage through long-range air strikes deep behind enemy lines will increase the impetus for an immediate ceasefire. <\/p>\n

But Putin remains confident that Russia\u2019s superior resources will eventually wear down Ukraine\u2019s resistance and has shown no interest in meeting Zelenskiy. The involvement of the sanctioned billionaire has not been previously reported.<\/p>\n

Putin said on Friday that he met \u201cone of the representatives of our business circles\u201d and \u201cthis, shall we say, colleague\u201d on May 21st after his trip to Kyiv, and told him he did not see any point in meeting Zelenskiy. \u201cThe only sense in it is for the Ukrainians to stop the advance of our armed forces,\u201d Putin told an audience at Russia\u2019s flagship economic conference in St Petersburg. <\/p>\n

The Russian president added that the businessman was not acting in an official capacity. The Ukrainian president\u2019s office declined to comment. The Kremlin and a spokesperson for Abramovich did not immediately respond to requests for comment. <\/p>\n

Abramovich has helped to mediate talks between Russia and Ukraine since the early weeks of the war in 2022. The oligarch was involved in brokering a round of negotiations in Istanbul in March of that year, though the efforts soon collapsed after Ukraine learned of alleged war crimes by Russia\u2019s occupying forces. <\/p>\n

Abramovich also helped to secure a deal to ensure exports of Ukraine\u2019s grain through the Black Sea later that year. Though Abramovich\u2019s role has become less prominent since Russia began negotiating directly with the US last year, he remains involved in prisoner exchanges and other bilateral talks with Ukraine, including on aspects of a stalled US-led peace plan, according to people close to him. \u201cHe is needed because he is the only Russian they will tolerate. He gets along with everyone,\u201d one of the people said. Zelenskiy has continued to push for a summit with Putin even as US efforts to secure a peace deal have stalled. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Putin says \u2018no point\u2019 in meeting Zelenskiy over ending Ukraine warOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think anything substantial will happen until the end of summer,\u201d said a person close to Zelenskiy, adding that Washington was focused on Iran \u2013 and Moscow had yet to realise it would not be able to capture the remainder of Ukraine\u2019s eastern Donbas region this summer. <\/p>\n

The Ukrainian leader, according to Abramovich, \u201cthinks he can solve everything through the magic of his personal charisma at a leadership meeting\u201d, another person close to the oligarch said. Abramovich refers to Zelenskiy\u2019s push as \u201cthe captain\u2019s competition\u201d, a feature from KVN, the comedy show that featured the Ukrainian president before he entered politics. \u201cThis is not something Putin goes for at all. And it doesn\u2019t really work on Trump either. But Zelenskiy is totally fixated on it,\u201d the person added. Two senior Ukrainian officials described the message that Zelenskiy sent via Abramovich as similar to the open letter addressed to Putin that he published on his presidential website on Thursday, which provoked an angry response from Moscow. <\/p>\n

\"Russia'sRussia’s president Vladimir Putin and vice president of China Han Zheng hold a meeting on the sidelines of the economic forum in St Petersburg. Photo: Valery Sharifulin\/AFP via Getty <\/p>\n

One of the officials said the tone of the message had been less antagonistic than that of the public note. In the letter, Zelenskiy offered a ceasefire and to hold direct, one-on-one peace talks while taunting Putin over his battlefield setbacks and Ukraine\u2019s long-range drone strikes on St Petersburg during his annual economic conference in his native city. <\/p>\n

The Ukrainian leader also mentioned Russia\u2019s reliance on North Korea and its growing dependence on China to sustain the war. \u201cYou will not have enough money or political capital to keep buying the loyalty of Russians the way you have for the past 26 years,\u201d Zelenskiy told Putin in the letter. But Putin said on Friday that the letter was \u201csomewhat rude\u201d and written \u201cto create a condition under which it is actually impossible to hold any in-person meetings at all\u201d. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Zelenskiy has said a meeting Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz in Downing Street will focus on support for Ukraine and co-operation on air defence \u201cfor the security of all of Europe\u201d.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, June 7th, a Russian drone strike damaged a storage centre for spent nuclear fuel in the Kyiv region, nine miles from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.<\/p>\n

The attack sparked a fire that was extinguished within an hour and radiation remains within safe levels, officials said.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian leader hit out at the \u201cextremely vile\u201d strike saying it was \u201can increase in Russia\u2019s brazenness\u201d. \u2013 The Financial Times\/PA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy invited former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich to Kyiv last month in a failed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,13764,3589,40,38,41,39,9688,5936,58419],"class_list":["post-488039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-roman-abramovich","tag-russia","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-ukraine-crisis","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}