Diplomacy widens as Ankara talks are announced on 7 March 2022
A look back at a day of mediation offers, a planned Russia–Ukraine foreign ministers' meeting in Turkey and a Hungarian decree that stopped short of Ukraine.
What did diplomacy look like on 7 March 2022, the twelfth day after the invasion began? It was a day of announcements, and of calls and offers that had accumulated over the preceding days.
A meeting set for Ankara
On 7 March 2022 it was announced that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba would meet Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in Ankara on the Thursday of that week. It would be the first Cabinet-level meeting between Russia and Ukraine since the invasion began.
The announcement followed a call on 6 March between Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Erdoğan urged Putin to declare a ceasefire. Putin said he was ready for dialogue to end the war, but warned that any attempt to draw out negotiations could fail. He also called on Ukraine to cease fighting for the military campaign to end.
Other channels
Turkey was not the only mediator in view. On 5 March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met Putin in Moscow to discuss the invasion and a potential ceasefire. He was the first world leader to meet Putin in person since the invasion began. On 6 March, Bennett said Israel would try to mediate a ceasefire even if the attempts did not succeed. Also on 5 March, Kyrgyzstan's Foreign Minister Ruslan Kazakbayev said he backed any efforts to mediate a ceasefire.
On 6 March, in a phone call with French president Emmanuel Macron, Putin said Russia would no longer attack nuclear power plants and was open to a trilateral meeting between Russia, Ukraine and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Moscow's warnings
The diplomatic overtures came alongside hard rhetoric. On 5 March, Putin said Western sanctions were akin to a declaration of war, and warned that any attempt to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine could have catastrophic consequences for the world. He also said that around 13,000 to 14,000 people had been killed in Donbas since 2014. That day he signed a decree allowing debts owed to creditors from unfriendly countries, a list to be determined within two days, to be settled in rubles at the exchange rate set by the Central Bank of Russia.
On the battlefield, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 6 March that Havryshivka Vinnytsia International Airport in Vinnytsia Oblast had been completely destroyed after being hit by eight Russian ballistic missiles.
Hungary's line
On 7 March 2022, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán signed a decree allowing the deployment of NATO troops in western Hungary and the transfer of lethal weapons across Hungarian territory to other NATO member states. The decree did not, however, permit weapons shipments across its territory to Ukraine.
