ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Russian and Ukrainian negotiators will meet in Istanbul on Friday for their first peace talks in more than three years as both sides come under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to end Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two.
The encounter at the Dolmabahce Palace on the Bosphorus is a sign of diplomatic progress between the warring sides, who had not met face-to-face since March 2022.
But expectations for a major breakthrough, already low, were dented further on Thursday when Trump said there would be no movement without a meeting between himself and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
Turkish Foreign Ministry sources said a meeting between Turkish, U.S. and Ukrainian officials would take place at 0745 GMT, followed by talks between Turkish, Russian and Ukrainian delegations at 0930 GMT.
Putin on Sunday proposed direct talks with Ukraine in Turkey, but has spurned a challenge from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to meet him in person, and instead has sent a team of mid-ranking officials to the talks.
Zelenskiy said Putin’s decision not to attend but to send what he called a “decorative” lineup showed the Russian leader was not serious about ending the war. Russia accused Ukraine of trying “to put on a show” around the talks.
Russia says it sees them 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.
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.
The U.S. State Department’s director of policy planning Michael Anton will represent the U.S. in the talks, said a state department spokesperson.
The Russian delegation is headed by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky and includes a deputy defence minister, a deputy foreign minister and the head of military intelligence.
Zelenskiy said on Thursday his team would be led by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov and include the deputy heads of Ukraine’s its intelligence services, the deputy chief of the military’s general staff and the deputy foreign minister.
(Reporting by Ece Toksabay and Reuters reporters in Istanbul, Ankara, Moscow and Kyiv; writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Michael Perry)
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