The events on the ground suggest otherwise, but Vladimir Putin indicated Friday that peace talks with Ukraine were yielding progress. "There are certain positive shifts, negotiators on our side tell me," Putin said at the Kremlin during a meeting with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, reports Reuters. "I will talk about all of this later." Putin spoke after no breakthroughs were reported following high-level talks on Thursday between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ukraine's Dmytro Kuleba. While Putin provided no details, his remarks were enough to lift the markets, notes CNBC.
Dow futures jumped about 300 points immediately after the comments, and the index rose by about that much at the opening bell. "The market’s reaction continues to highlight how powerful a snapback could be if there is a cease-fire and some type of diplomatic negotiation," Ivan Feinseth of Tigress Financial Partners tells the Washington Post. Still, Russia has only expanded its military operation throughout the country of late, notes the AP. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his forces had "reached a strategic turning point" in the conflict.
"It's impossible to say how many days we will still need to free our land, but it is possible to say that we will do it because ... we have reached a strategic turning point," he said, without offering details. While Putin's comments were also similarly short on details, a Kremlin spokesman didn't appear to budge on what Moscow has been saying all along to justify the military operation: He cited the alleged killing of pro-Russian civilians in eastern Ukraine and Russia's opposition to NATO expanding eastward. "We need to find a resolution to these two questions," he said. "Russia formulated concrete demands to Ukraine to resolve those questions." (More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
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