Russia and Ukraine are to hold a third round of negotiations in Istanbul, with expectations low for progress on a peace agreement to end the full-scale war that’s in its fourth year.
A Russian delegation led by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky left Moscow on Wednesday for the talks in Turkey with a Ukrainian team led by Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov. The meeting is expected to begin in the early evening, the Russian state-run RIA Novosti news service reported.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that his officials were ready for talks on prisoner exchanges and on preparing for a leaders’ meeting “to truly end this war.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, downplayed that prospect, telling reporters on Tuesday that “a lot of work” still had to be done before any meeting could be discussed.
The latest talks are taking place after U.S. President Donald Trump last week issued a 50-day deadline for Putin to agree to a ceasefire, and threatened “very severe” secondary sanctions against countries that buy Russian oil and gas if he fails to comply. Trump also said the U.S. would send additional military aid to Ukraine including Patriot air defense systems that will be paid for by Kyiv’s European allies.
Russia has unleashed record drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, prompting Trump to accuse Putin of a lack of sincerity in diplomacy to end the war. “He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening,” Trump said.
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Peskov said the sides were likely to discuss draft memorandums setting out their respective positions on terms for a potential peace deal that were presented at the last talks in June. Russia wasn’t counting on “miraculous breakthroughs,” he said, according to the Tass news service.
That meeting and an earlier one in May yielded agreements on prisoner exchanges, though no progress on ending the Russian invasion that began in February 2022.
Ukraine wants an unconditional truce to create space for peace talks. Russia has rejected that and is maintaining hardline demands for Kyiv to accept a neutral status and to withdraw its forces from four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine that Moscow is claiming but doesn’t fully occupy.
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