Ukraine: is the date with Russia just a political sideshow?

This was a successful attack on Russian vehicles, according to the Ukrainian Air Force 1:15

Moscow (CNN) --

A meeting between Russia and Ukraine is underway Monday at the Ukraine-Belarus border near the Pripyat River.

Is this a diplomatic breakthrough or a political sideshow as Russia continues its offensive in Ukraine?

Let's clarify what this is not: the meeting is not a summit between the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

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Instead, it is a meeting between delegations from both sides.

Zelensky's office said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko called the Ukrainian president on Sunday and offered security assurances, saying Lukashenko "took responsibility for ensuring that all planes, helicopters and missiles stationed on Belarusian territory remain in land during the trip, the meeting and the return trip of the Ukrainian delegation".

White House calls Putin's actions "manufactured threats" 2:05

But can Ukraine accept any guarantees from Lukashenko?

This is the same leader whose authorities forced the landing of a Ryanair flight that passed through Belarusian airspace last year, citing a "security alert," and arrested a young Belarusian dissident, sparking international outcry.

The meeting scheduled for Monday follows a flurry of statements from the Kremlin, which earlier claimed that the Ukrainian side had responded to Russia's proposal to meet in Belarus with a proposal to meet in Warsaw and then called off the contact.

Zelensky's office denied claims that they refused to negotiate.

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Continuing a military offensive while holding out the promise of a diplomatic track is somewhat reminiscent of the so-called "Astana process": talks in the Kazakh capital in 2017, brokered in part by Russia to facilitate negotiations between the Syrian opposition and officials who They represent Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

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Iran and Turkey, which supported opposing sides in the Syrian civil war, also helped broker those talks, but some observers saw them as an effort by Russia to create a diplomatic track that Moscow could follow, even as Russian warplanes they kept hitting Assad's enemies.

Zelensky himself, on Sunday, lowered expectations for the meeting, and it is tempting to assume that the border meeting will yield little.

But he offers Putin at least some potential room to exit the war in Ukraine, if his troops continue to face battlefield setbacks against Ukrainian forces.

Putin's offensive is still in its infancy, and Russia may shift more fighting power to Ukraine.

Ominously enough, Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of Russia's Chechnya region, called on the Russian military on Sunday to expand its offensive in Ukraine.

Several European Union countries close their airspace to Russian planes 3:26

"The time has come to make a concrete decision and start a large-scale operation in all directions and territories of Ukraine," Kadyrov said in a statement on his Telegram account.

"I myself have repeatedly developed tactics and strategies against terrorists, participated in battles. As I understand it, the chosen tactics in Ukraine are too slow. They last a long time and, in my opinion, are not effective."

That is a terrifying sentiment for a man who runs Chechnya as his personal fiefdom and has been accused by international and independent observers of serious human rights violations in his native republic and beyond.

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It was also a particularly chilling statement to hear on February 27, the seventh anniversary of the assassination of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015.

People gathered Sunday to lay flowers on the bridge in central Moscow where Nemtsov was shot, just a stone's throw from the Kremlin wall.

Nemtsov's death commemorations are an annual event in the Russian capital, but this year's observance was a silent demonstration against the war: Many people brought blue and gold flowers, the color of the Ukrainian flag, and left notes saying : "No to war" and "Don't shoot".

Nemtsov was an outspoken critic of Putin's handling of the 2014 Ukraine crisis and, at the time of his death, was allegedly investigating the involvement of Russian forces in key battles in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, at a time when that the Kremlin still denied sending its troops there.

Now their presence is in full view, along with a broader war engulfing Ukraine.

Conflict Russia - Ukraine