ISTANBUL (Reuters) -A second round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine ended barely an hour after they began in Istanbul on Monday, Turkish officials said, a day after a massive Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers.
The talks – the second such direct contacts between the sides since 2022 – had already begun nearly two hours later than scheduled with no explanation of the delay.
The mood in Russia was angry as the talks kicked off, with influential war bloggers calling on Moscow to deliver a fearsome retaliatory blow against Kyiv after Ukraine on Sunday launched one of its most ambitious attacks of the war, targeting Russian nuclear-capable long-range bombers in Siberia and elsewhere.
Ukraine and Russia have issued starkly different assessments of the damage done to Russia’s fleet of nuclear-capable bombers – a key element in its nuclear arsenal – but it was clear from publicly available satellite imagery that Moscow had suffered some serious equipment losses.
“The eyes of the whole world are focused on the contacts here,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told the Russian and Ukrainian delegations as they faced off against each other on opposite sides of the room in the sumptuous Ciragan Palace by the Bosphorus.
He said the aim of the meeting was to evaluate the conditions for a ceasefire, to discuss a possible meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents, and to look at more prisoner exchange opportunities.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking in Lithuania, later said the two sides were preparing a new exchange of prisoners of war.
His chief of staff also said the Ukrainian delegation had handed over a list of deported children to Russia during Monday’s talks that Ukraine wants returned home.
Ukrainian officials say there are hundreds of children who were forcibly removed from Ukrainian territory by Russian forces, and it wants them returned as part of a peace deal. Moscow says the children were moved to protect them from fighting.
No other details about Monday’s talks were immediately available.
The two sides had been expected to discuss their respective and wildly different ideas for what a full ceasefire and a longer term path to peace should look like amid pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has said the U.S. could abandon its role as a mediator if there is no progress.
(Writing by Andrew Osborn; Additional reporting by Lidia Kelly, Olena Harmash in Kyiv, Ezgi Erkoyun in Istanbul, Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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