Under different circumstances, today could go down in history as the beginning of the end of one of the greatest wars the world has known in the 21st century. But on May 15 in Constantinople it will not happen, based on the official list of the Russian mission, nothing more and nothing less than what took place in the same city in 2022 a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory in the only bilateral diplomatic contact between Moscow and Kiev since the beginning of the war: absolute nothing.

The list the Kremlin has released late Wednesday night is made up of people who have neither the power, nor the knowledge and especially the prestige to advance a cause as difficult as peace in Eastern Europe. For some there is even a reading of “mockery” on the part of Russia as the man who has been appointed to head this mission is the man who carried the message of Vladimir Putin and in 2022 and received in response more than three years of war, fighting, losses and isolation, Vladimir Medinsky.

Medinsky who is “Chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee for Historical Education of Russia” and the most important political position he has received from the Russian President is the 8-year (from 2012 to 2020) position of the country’s Minister of Education. Medinsky has no diplomatic background worth mentioning and has essentially been Moscow’s most “neutral” person in the first phase of the war. As a matter of form, in addition to Mendinsky, the mission includes Mikhail Galuzin, Igor Kostyukov and Alexander Formin. Galuzhin and Formin, Russia’s undersecretaries of state for foreign affairs and defense, have a certain special weight but in no way can they represent Russia at a summit in which both the President of Ukraine and the U.S. Secretary of State are given the opportunity to be present.

Moscow’s move once again shows that Russia today is not prepared and unwilling to enter into a meaningful discussion about ending the war and is attempting, beyond undermining any US effort to find a golden mean or a humble but meaningful start, to dynamite any proposal it cannot avoid.

Given today in Turkey, barring something extremely unexpected, neither will Ukrainian President Zelensky, who yesterday made it clear that without the Russian President’s presence there is no point in his attending such a meeting and probably no US President Trump who had left a “window” for him to go to Turkey in order to make some meaningful progress with his and Tayyip Erdogan’s mediation.

With this move Moscow, apart from the fact that it sets a very low bar for what is expected to be produced by this effort, it seems that for the third consecutive time it chooses to abstain, even by giving the present, from any proposal made by the US to bring the war situation to a gradual at least gradual de-escalation.

The stakes of the 30-day ceasefire are the only one in which we can hope to find a point of convergence, although with the data at hand it is very unlikely that even this positive development will occur. The point that seems to have been bothering the US diplomacy, however, and in particular the US Secretary of State Rubio is that Moscow chose to make the announcement of its mission to Turkey late last night with him normally present leaving Donald Trump’s side, who is on a three-day tour of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

Marco Rubio given will be present as the meeting is mainly his initiative, but he cannot join the negotiations he was aiming for and for him would be a follow-up to the first diplomatic summit in years in Saudi Arabia in mid-February last year.

It remains a question mark as to what he will choose to do after what is taking place with yet another US initiative being wasted by Donald Trump himself, who in recent days has openly noted when asked about the issue that he is seriously considering imposing additional sanctions specifically on Russia’s energy sources. In any case, Moscow after his arrival in the Oval Office, although back in the diplomatic limelight, for the US, seems completely unwilling to make any move towards a diplomatic resolution of a war that has already lasted more than half of the greatest devastation the world has known, World War II.