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Today, we are almost 24 hours away from the most important meeting in recent years. A meeting that could decide the fate of Ukraine and beyond.
Vladimir Putin will meet with Donald Trump tomorrow, but he has yet to speak to Volodymyr Zelensky despite calls for a meeting from the Ukrainian leader in May this year.
So when did Putin and Zelensky last meet?
The first meeting took place in 2019, when the two sides discussed ending the fighting in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, where Ukrainian troops have been fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
What happened during the 2019 meeting?
To try to end the fighting in the Donbas region, Zelensky and Putin traveled to Paris in December 2019 for the Normandy Format Summit, an informal forum that was created by French, German, Russian, and Ukrainian diplomats after the start of the conflict in Donbas.
This came after Zelensky, who had never held political office, became president of Ukraine in May of that year.
In the election, he defeated Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire confectionery magnate and former Ukrainian foreign minister who had met and spoken directly with Putin on numerous occasions but had failed to resolve the conflict with Russia.
Alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin and Zelensky sat across from each other at a roundtable to discuss how to end the conflict that has left thousands dead.
The summit led to several agreements between the two nations. This included implementing “all necessary measures to support a ceasefire” by the end of 2019 and releasing all prisoners of war.
Agreements were also reached to withdraw troops from three other areas of the Donbas region by the end of March 2020, as both Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels had already withdrawn from three frontline locations in the months leading up to the meeting.
Both sides also said they wanted to implement the political provisions of the Minsk agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015 as a first attempt to secure a ceasefire between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatists.
The agreements included an action plan for elections in the occupied regions of Luhansk and Donetsk and a plan for the reintegration of the territory into the rest of Ukraine.
What happened next?
The 2019 meeting was seen at the time as a significant step forward in ending the conflict, and some prisoner exchanges took place, but it failed to provoke any real long-term change.
Russia and Ukraine continued to disagree on issues including the withdrawal of Russian-backed troops and elections in areas of Ukraine held by separatist rebels.
The summit was held again in Paris in January 2022, but it was attended by representatives of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France, not the four leaders. In February 2022, top diplomats met again, this time in Berlin, to try to find a way out of the conflict.
Weeks later, on February 24, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In a speech to the French parliament in March 2022, Zelensky said the invasion had “destroyed” the Normandy Format efforts.
Unlike the 2019 discussions, America has been heavily involved in efforts to ensure peace between neighboring countries.
In May of this year, Trump strongly encouraged Zelensky to "immediately" accept the invitation to the talks in Turkey, going so far as to say he was "considering" attending himself.
But Putin's absence was seen as a clear disdain for the American leader. Since then, the relationship between the two leaders has had its ups and downs, filled with threats, snubs and deadlines. Today, we are almost 24 hours away from the most important meeting in recent years that could decide the fate of Ukraine, but not only./ Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "SkyNews"
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