MOSCOW — Every few months a Russian official confirms that the line to Kyiv still works, and every time the confirmation lands the same way: as reassurance about plumbing rather than news about politics.
Mikhail Galuzin, a deputy foreign minister, told RIA Novosti that authorised employees of the two countries’ special services remain able to reach one another. It is no secret, he said, and President Vladimir Putin has said so publicly more than once, that even in the most difficult times those channels stay open.
What Galuzin did not say is what the channel is currently carrying, whether it is active this week, or at what level it operates. Those omissions are the story. A line that exists is not the same as a line being used, and the distinction is the whole difference between a technical arrangement and a negotiation.
The evidence for what the channel actually does is unusually good, because its outputs are public and countable. On August 19 the two sides exchanged 103 prisoners each, with the United Arab Emirates mediating. Earlier in the year they swapped 157 apiece, again through Abu Dhabi. Those exchanges trace back to the three rounds of direct talks held in Istanbul in 2025, the last formal negotiations either government has attended, and they have outlived the process that created them by more than a year.
So the machinery works. It moves people, in batches, roughly quarterly, under third-party supervision. It has not moved a single point of political substance.
That is a precise and revealing detail. Two governments that have not had embassies in each other’s capitals since 2022 are passing consular paperwork through a third state, and the third state is Russia’s closest ally rather than a neutral. Kyiv accepts the arrangement because the alternative is no channel at all, which tells you something about how few options exist, and it accepts the asymmetry because consular business cannot wait for a better forum.
The pattern across both statements is that the surviving contacts are the ones nobody has to defend politically. Prisoner exchanges are popular in both countries. Consular correspondence is invisible. Neither requires a minister to stand next to a counterpart, and neither implies recognition of anything. What has not survived is the category of contact that would.
Galuzin’s own framing elsewhere makes the limit explicit. Earlier this month he said Russian representatives had always been open to negotiations and that it was the Ukrainian side that broke them off and banned them, a reference to the 2022 Ukrainian decree ruling out talks with Putin personally. Kyiv’s position is that Russia’s terms have never moved off demands it regards as capitulation. Both governments therefore describe themselves as available and the other as the obstacle, which is a stable arrangement that produces nothing.
What makes the special-services detail worth attending to anyway is who is on the line. Intelligence services, not diplomats, are the ones with a standing reason to keep talking through a war: exchanges, bodies, deconfliction, the occasional message that cannot go through any registry. Those contacts survive precisely because they are deniable. That also means they are a poor foundation for anything larger. A channel that works because nobody has to admit it exists cannot easily be scaled into a channel that settles borders.
There is a version of this that matters more than it looks. In most long wars, the technical channel is the one that eventually carries the first real message, because the people running it have already established that the other side answers. Nothing in either Russian statement suggests that has happened. But nothing rules it out either, and Galuzin chose to raise the subject unprompted, which is itself a small signal that Moscow wants the existence of the channel on the record.
What remains unknown is most of it. Neither official said when the special-services contacts were last used or for what. Ukraine’s government has not commented on Galuzin’s characterisation, and Kyiv has generally declined to discuss the channel at all, which is consistent with a contact that only functions while it stays quiet. Nobody has said whether Minsk reads the correspondence it forwards. And no one on either side has suggested that any of it is being used to discuss an end to the fighting.
The next test is measurable rather than rhetorical. If another exchange happens on the usual rhythm, the channel is doing what it has done for three years. If one is announced with anything attached to it, that would be new.
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