- Second round of direct talks held in Türkiye.
- The positions of Russia and Ukraine are still distant.
- The two parties accept a new exchange of prisoners.
The peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul barely ended an hour after starting on Monday, one day after a huge Ukrainian drone attack on strategic nuclear capacity bombers in Russia.
The talks – second direct contacts of this type between the sides since 2022 – had already started almost two hours later than expected, without explanation of the delay.
Although the atmosphere was moderate and brief the dialogue, the talks gave an agreement to carry out a new exchange of prisoners and that Ukraine said that another round of talks was on the agenda.
In Russia, before the start of talks, angry war bloggers called Moscow to bring a formidable reprisals against kyiv after Ukraine launched one of his most ambitious war attacks on Sunday, targeting the long -range Russian bombers in Siberia and elsewhere.
Ukraine and Russia have published very different assessments of the damage caused to the fleet of strategic bombers of Russia – a key element of its nuclear arsenal – but it clearly emerges from satellite imagery accessible to the public that Moscow had undergone serious loss of equipment.
“Eyes around the world are focusing on contacts here,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said, said Russian and Ukrainian delegations at the start of talks while facing each other on the opposite sides of the play in the sumptuous Ciragan palace by the Bosphorus.
He said that the meeting objective was to assess the conditions of ceasefire, to discuss a possible meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents, and to examine more opportunities for the exchange of prisoners.
The Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Rustem Umerov, who directed the kyiv delegation, announced after the talks that a new exchange of prisoners had been agreed to follow the greatest exchange of prisoners of the negotiated war during the last round of talks.
He said the new exchange would focus on people seriously injured in war and young people.
UMEROV also said that Moscow had handed over his own peace project to Ukraine and that kyiv, who wrote his own version, would examine the Russian document.
Ukraine has proposed to hold more talks before the end of June, but believes that only a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin can solve many controversy problems, said Umerov.
Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said that the kyiv delegation had given a list of children who, according to him, had been expelled to Russia and that he wanted to return. Moscow says these children were moved to protect them from fighting.
The two parties were expected on Monday to discuss their respective and madly different ideas for a complete ceasefire and a long-term path to peace should look like the middle of the American president Donald Trump, who said that the United States could abandon his role as mediator in the event of progress.
But Umerov said kyiv had not been able to react to Russia’s peace proposals because she hadn’t seen them until on Monday.
Weak expectations
While the two countries, for different reasons, wish to keep Trump engaged in the peace process, the expectations of a breakthrough Monday had been weak.
Ukraine considers the approach of Russia to date as an attempt to force him to capitulate – something that Kyiv says that he will never do – while Moscow, who progressed on the battlefield in May at his own pace in six months, says that Kyiv should submit to peace on Russian conditions or face the loss of more territory.
Putin established his opening mandates for an immediate end to war last June: Ukraine must abandon its NATO ambitions and withdraw all its troops from the entire territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mainly controlled by Russia.
According to a roadmap proposed by Ukraine, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, kyiv does not want any restriction on his military force after any peace agreement, no international recognition of Russian sovereignty on certain parts of Ukraine taken by the forces of Moscow and does not want repairs.
Russia currently controls a little less than a fifth in Ukraine, about 113,100 square km, about the same size as the US Ohio State.
Putin sent tens of thousands of soldiers to Ukraine on February 24, 2022, after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine between the separatists supported by Russia and the Ukrainian forces.
The United States said more than 1.2 million people have been killed and injured during the war since 2022.
Trump called Putin “crazy” and reprimanded Zelenskiy in public in the oval office, but the American president also said that he thought that peace was feasible and that Putin delays, he could impose difficult sanctions on Russia.
