ISTANBUL (Reuters) -Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Istanbul on Friday at their first direct peace talks in more than three years, under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to end Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two.
Live television showed Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan addressing Russian and Ukrainian negotiators at the lavish Dolmabahce Palace on the Bosphorus. Half of the Ukrainian delegation wore camouflage military fatigues, sitting at a table directly facing their Russian counterparts, who were in suits.
Fidan said it was critical to achieve a ceasefire as soon as possible. He said he was happy to see the will of both sides to open a new window of opportunity for peace, and it was important that the Istanbul talks form the basis for a meeting between leaders of the two countries.
“There are two paths ahead of us: one road will take us on a process that will lead to peace, while the other will lead to more destruction and death. The sides will decide on their own, with their own will, which path they choose,” Fidan said.
The warring sides had not met face-to-face since March 2022, the month after Russia’s invasion.
Expectations for a major breakthrough, already low, were dented further on Thursday when Trump, winding up a Middle East tour, said there would be no movement without a meeting between himself and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
The head of Ukraine’s delegation, setting out Kyiv’s priorities, said peace was only possible if Russia agreed to a 30-day ceasefire, the return of abducted Ukrainian children and an exchange of all prisoners of war.
Russia says it wants to end the war by diplomatic means and is ready to discuss a ceasefire. But it has raised a list of questions and concerns, saying Ukraine could use a pause to rest its forces, mobilize extra troops and acquire more western weapons.
Ukraine and its allies accuse Putin of stalling, and say he is not serious about wanting peace.
PUTIN STAYS AWAY
It was Putin who proposed the direct talks in Turkey, but he spurned a challenge from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to meet him there in person, instead sending a team of mid-level officials. Ukraine responded by naming negotiators of similar rank.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg were also in Istanbul, where a flurry of separate diplomatic contacts took place earlier on Friday.
Rubio told reporters on Thursday night that, based on the level of the negotiating teams, a major breakthrough was unlikely.
“I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’m 100% wrong. I hope tomorrow the news says they’ve agreed to a ceasefire; they’ve agreed to enter serious negotiations. But I’m just giving you my assessment, honestly,” he said.
Russia said on Friday it had captured another village in its slow, grinding advance in eastern Ukraine. Minutes before the start of the Istanbul meeting, Ukrainian media reported an air alert and explosions in the city of Dnipro.
Russia says it sees the talks as a continuation of the negotiations that took place in the early weeks of the war in 2022, also in Istanbul.
But the terms under discussion then, when Ukraine was still reeling from Russia’s initial invasion, would be deeply disadvantageous to Kyiv. They included a demand by Moscow for large cuts to the size of Ukraine’s military.
Zelenskiy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said Russian attempts to align the current talks with the unsuccessful earlier negotiations would fail.
With Russian forces now in control of close to a fifth of Ukraine, Putin has held fast to his longstanding demands for Kyiv to cede territory, abandon its NATO membership ambitions and become a neutral country.
Ukraine rejects these terms as tantamount to capitulation, and is seeking guarantees of its future security from world powers, especially the United States.
MUTUAL HOSTILITY
Ukraine repelled Russia’s initial assault on the capital Kyiv in 2022 and recaptured swathes of land seized by Russians in the war’s first year. But since then Russian forces have slowly but relentlessly advanced for most of the past two years.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been wounded or killed on both sides. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed, whole cities have been destroyed and millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes.
Moscow says it was forced to mount its “special military operation” in response to NATO expansion and the prospect that the western alliance would admit Ukraine as a member and use it as a launchpad to attack Russia. Any settlement of the conflict must address these “root causes”, the Kremlin says.
Kyiv and its allies reject that as a false pretext for what they call an imperial-style land grab.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s army chief, said late on Thursday that Russia has about 640,000 troops in Ukraine at the moment and had “turned its aggression against Ukraine into a war of attrition”. He said there was active combat along the entire frontline, stretching many hundreds of miles.
(Reporting by Can Sezer, Humeyra Pamuk, Tom Balmforth and Vladimir Soldatkin in Istanbul, Olena Harmash in Kyiv, Ece Toksabay and Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara and Reuters reporters in Moscow; Writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Peter Graff)
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