MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing.

Ukraine launched an unprecedented cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations.

Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in the city of Vladivostok, Putin said Russia was ready for talks but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul in 2022, the terms of which were never made public.

“Are we ready to negotiate with them? We have never refused to do so, but not on the basis of some ephemeral demands, but on the basis of those documents that were agreed and actually initialled in Istanbul,” Putin said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly claimed Russia and Ukraine were on the verge of a deal in the spring of 2022, shortly after Moscow launched its offensive in Ukraine.

“We managed to reach an agreement, that is the whole point. The signature of the head of the Ukrainian delegation who initialled this document testifies to this, which means that the Ukrainian side was generally satisfied with the agreements reached,” Putin said.

“It did not come into force only because they were given a command not to do so, because the elites of the United States, Europe — some European countries — wanted to achieve a strategic defeat of Russia,” Putin added.

Meanwhile, the death toll from a Russian missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Poltava rose to 54 with nearly 300 wounded, Ukrainian officials said Thursday.