Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov says Russia remains in the preparatory phase for negotiations on Ukraine, TASS reports

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov says Russia remains in the preparatory phase for negotiations on Ukraine, TASS reports.

Statements of this kind sit in the pre-negotiation phase that has characterised this conflict's periodic contact cycles, where both sides signal process without conceding substance, and where the pattern has been that talk of preparation precedes, sometimes by a long interval, any actual agenda or venue. The transmission channel has typically run through European gas and power curves, wheat and associated freight, and the rouble and hryvnia-adjacent assets, with oil reacting mainly where the read-through is sanctions relief or supply normalisation rather than mere de-escalation. The actor matters: Ryabkov carries the arms control and US-relations brief rather than the Ukraine file, and Russian messaging through TASS has historically served to test counterparties and shape the record as much as to inform, so phrasing about a preparatory phase reads as status confirmation, not movement. The distinction worth drawing is between contact on process, which recurs, and movement on terms, territory, sanctions sequencing, security guarantees, which is what has durably repriced in past episodes. What tends to follow is confirmation or denial from Kyiv and Washington, since unilateral process claims have repeatedly been walked back by the other side. As it stands this is rhetoric at the low end of the signal scale; the desk-level tell is whether counterparties echo it.