An apartment building in Kyiv, Ukraine, damaged by a Russian missile and drone assault on 24 May 2026. Dsns.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In early June, the Kremlin rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call to hold new peace talks, ending mounting speculation that negotiations may resume. Earlier public statements by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, had hinted that Moscow was ready to talk.

Those statements were followed by an open letter from Zelensky to Putin, in which he called for a ceasefire and a face-to-face meeting. However, Putin ultimately dismissed the request and said there was no ‘point’ in meeting until Kyiv withdrew from Russia-occupied territories in Ukraine and abandoned its bid to join NATO.

‘The prospects for meaningful talks remain grim,’ says Marta Mucznik, Senior EU Analyst at the International Crisis Group in Brussels. ‘There is no peace process to speak of at the moment. On the contrary, strikes are intensifying and casualties are growing on both sides. The war still appears driven more by battlefield calculations than by any genuine diplomatic opening, with both Moscow and Kyiv seemingly convinced that time could still improve their position.’

In June, Ukraine launched an attack involving over 140 drones against energy and military targets in St Petersburg during Russia’s International Economic Forum. Putin called the attack ‘unprecedented’, but both sides have been increasing their attacks on energy infrastructure in recent months. The UN condemned a recent Russian attack on a storage facility in Zaporizhzhia close to the disused Chornobyl nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine.

However, even as the economic, political and psychological costs of the war increase daily, Mucznik says identifying a solution that both sides will accept remains extremely challenging. ‘Russia continues to demand the territorial ceding of all of Donbas, while Ukraine rejects territorial concessions and insists on credible security guarantees,’ she says. ‘Those positions remain fundamentally incompatible. Also, Russian officials know that the US is consumed by the war in the Middle East and has limited political bandwidth for a major diplomatic push on Ukraine even if Russian officials are likely to prefer negotiating with Trump especially before the [US] midterm elections – so the window of opportunity is narrow.’

Markus Beham, Co-Chair of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee, says any peace treaty that involves Ukraine ceding territory to Russia could risk violating Article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and be declared void. ‘The last and real proper peace treaties were after the Second World War and since then the development of international law has moved towards saying that any treaty concluded under duress or coercion – be it either coercion against organs of the state or the state itself – is invalid,’ says Beham. ‘That’s one of the big legal hurdles that one would have to overcome in concluding a peace treaty.’

As the civilian death toll from the conflict rises, Beham – who’s Chair of Public International Law at the European University Viadrina – says a peace agreement would also need to address important issues such as widespread reports of human rights violations and potential pathways for reparations and transitional justice. ‘The question is what happens with all of these human rights abuses that have occurred and will continue to occur,’ he says. ‘Will they be made part of a peace agreement? Or is the peace agreement restricted to territorial concessions alone?’

In December, the EU reached an eleventh-hour deal on a two-year €90bn loan to support Ukraine, which was finalised in April. The rescue package is due to be rolled out later in June and is expected to fund arms production, the procurement of weapons from partners outside Ukraine and support energy and other critical infrastructure. In May, the EU finalised a separate €6bn drone support package for Ukraine.

Mucznik says Russia’s recent drone incursion into Romania on NATO’s eastern flank will only serve to exacerbate the bloc’s ongoing concerns about European security. In late May, a Russian drone injured two Romanian civilians after entering the country’s airspace near Galaţi. Kayoko Gotoh, a director in the UN political and peace departments, said the incident ‘crystallised’ the UN’s ‘oft-stated warnings about potential spillover of the war’. Russian authorities responded to the incident by questioning the origins of the drone.

Such acts, Mucznik warns, make the prospects of the EU easing sanctions on Russia extremely unlikely without major concessions from the Kremlin. ‘EU leaders are not prepared to negotiate on terms remotely close to those set out by the Kremlin, especially with Ukraine able to slow the Russian offensive, even if we are seeing a growing movement in Europe in favour of some form of engagement with Moscow,’ she says.

The European Commission announced on 9 June the bloc’s 21st package of sanctions against Russia, which it says will focus on ‘energy, financial services and crypto, trade – including fisheries, for the first time.’ It will also continue to target Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ – vessels used to bypass Western sanctions restrictions.