Russia's Foreign Minister Lavrov says Russia is ready for reasonable compromises on Ukraine, IFX reports; Russia will not stop fighting during peace talks

Russia's Foreign Minister Lavrov says Russia is ready for reasonable compromises on Ukraine, IFX reports; Russia will not stop fighting during peace talks.

Statements pairing openness to compromise with a refusal to halt fighting during talks are the standard Russian negotiating posture in this conflict and have been repeated, in various forms, across every previous round of contact. The pattern in comparable episodes is that the conciliatory half of the formulation is aimed at the mediators and the opposing coalition rather than at Kyiv, while the no-ceasefire clause preserves battlefield leverage, so the two halves together usually signal process continuation rather than a shift in position. Lavrov is the established channel for this kind of signal; his remarks have historically been more reliable as an indicator of tactical mood in Moscow than of any actual softening of terms, with substantive movement tending to come through quieter back channels. The distinction that matters is between talks-with-fighting, which is the current baseline, and any conditional ceasefire language, which would mark a genuine change in sequencing and is what past de-escalation phases began with. The tells to follow are whether parallel language emerges from Kyiv and Washington, whether Russian demands stated elsewhere narrow, and any movement on the energy and grains corridors, which have been the first transmission channel into markets in prior rounds. As stated, this reads as posture maintenance rather than escalation or concession.