Kremlin says a 2022 Ukrainian law bans Zelenskyy from talks with Putin

The decree enacted a decision by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to bolster Ukrainian defenses and seek more weapons from the country’s Western allies.

A Ukrainian decree from 2022 ruling out negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin raises the question of who could sit at the table in potential peace talks aimed at ending their three-year war, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “is still legally prohibited from negotiating with the Russian side,” Peskov noted during his daily conference call with reporters.

He said it was “positive” that Zelenskyy expressed readiness Tuesday to negotiate peace with Russia as soon as possible. “But the details have not changed yet,” Peskov added, apparently referring to the Ukrainian decree.

Neither Ukrainian nor Western officials have recently mentioned the September 2022 presidential decree, signed seven months after Russia’s cross-border invasion, in the context of U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to stop the fighting.

The Trump administration on Monday suspended its crucial military aid to Ukraine as the United States sought to pressure Zelenskyy into negotiating an end to the war. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the support would resume after Zelenskyy’s seeming effort to placate Trump.

Ukrainian forces are toiling to slow Russian advances along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, especially in the eastern Donetsk region. The Russian onslaught, which has been costly for its troops, hasn’t yet brought a strategically significant breakthrough for the Kremlin. The war of attrition has killed tens of thousands of soldiers and more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians.

Zelenskyy’s 2022 decree declared that holding negotiations with Putin became impossible after the Kremlin’s decision to illegally annex four regions of Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

The decree enacted a decision by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to bolster Ukrainian defenses and seek more weapons from the country’s Western allies.

The Kremlin said at the time it would wait for Ukraine to sit down for talks on ending the conflict, noting that such a step may not happen until a new Ukrainian president takes office