Considering that European NATO partners are urgently trying to expand the Ukraine conflict and assemble a united NATO war effort against the Russian Federation, it is worth reviewing the current position of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin held a press conference on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan. A transcript is below:

Olga Knyazeva: Today, very much attention is given to our contacts with the United States. The CIA director has reportedly visited [Moscow] to offer trilateral Russia-US-Ukraine talks.
Do you think we need any negotiation tracks now or possibly new intermediaries, including American ones?
Vladimir Putin: First, communication between our intelligence services is maintained at all times. You may have noticed that we have recently handed over to the American side an American citizen who was serving a prison term in Russia. We did that for health and humanitarian reasons. He is a simple guy, a drinker and a brawler with health problems, so we sent him home to get medical assistance.
It was my first point. Communication is and was always maintained, even in the most difficult periods of the Cold War, and even more so now. Direct contacts are also maintained between the senior officials of our intelligence services.
As for expanding the number of negotiators, we believe that negotiations, any kind of negotiations, should be primarily filled with concrete content. If anyone is making or can make a practical contribution to this process, we are all for it.
The only thing we would like to avoid is to carry on a senseless process. If anyone can make a positive contribution to this negotiating process, which has been frozen to some extent, as we see this, we would not be against this. But this requires the involvement of specialists, the military and diplomats, of course.
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