Istanbul: Delegations from Russia and Ukraine ended their latest peace talks Monday in Turkey after just over an hour, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian state media said.
Speaking in Vilnius, Lithuania, Zelenskyy said both sides “exchanged documents through the Turkish side, and we are preparing a new release of prisoners of the war”.
The two sides also agreed to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action.
Expectations were low for any breakthrough on ending the 3-year-old war after a string of stunning attacks over the weekend.
Kyiv officials said a surprise drone attack Sunday damaged or destroyed more than 40 warplanes at air bases deep inside Russia, including the remote Arctic, Siberian and Far East regions more than 7,000 kilometres from Ukraine.
The complex and unprecedented raid, which struck simultaneously in three time zones, took over a year and a half to prepare and was “a major slap in the face for Russia’s military power,” said Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the Ukrainian security service who led its planning.
Zelenskyy called it a “brilliant operation” that would go down in history. The operation destroyed or heavily damaged nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia Sunday fired the biggest number of drones — 472 — at Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s air force said, in an apparent effort to overwhelm air defences. That was part of a recently escalating campaign of strikes in civilian areas of Ukraine.
Hopes not high for the peace talks
In Lithuania, Zelenskyy said a new release of prisoners of war was being prepared after the Istanbul meeting. The previous direct talks May 16 also led to a swap of prisoners, with 1,000 on both sides being exchanged.
Ukraine also handed Russia an official list of children it says were forcibly deported and must be returned, said Andriy Yermak, head of Zelenskyy’s office.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had chaired the peace talks at Istanbul’s Ciragan Palace, a residence dating from the Ottoman Empire.
The talks aimed to discuss both sides’ ceasefire terms, he said, adding that “the whole world’s eyes are focused on the contacts and discussions you will have here”.
US-led efforts to push the two sides into accepting a ceasefire have so far failed. Ukraine accepted that step, but the Kremlin effectively rejected it.
The Ukrainian delegation was led by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, while Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, headed the Kremlin team.
The Russian and Ukrainian delegations, each numbering more than a dozen people, sat at a U-shaped table across from each other with Turkish officials between them. Many of the Ukrainians wore military fatigues.
Recent comments by senior officials in both countries indicate they remain far apart on the key conditions for stopping the war.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Sunday that “Russia is attempting to delay negotiations and prolong the war in order to make additional battlefield gains”.
The relentless fighting has frustrated US President Donald Trump’s goal of bringing about a quick end to the war. A week ago, he expressed impatience with Putin as Moscow pounded Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles for a third straight night. Trump said on social media that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
A round of renewed direct talks, held May 16, also in Istanbul, ended after less than two hours. While both sides agreed on a large prisoner swap, there was no breakthrough.
Ukraine upbeat after strikes on air bases
Ukraine was triumphant after targeting the distant Russian air bases. The official Russian response was muted, with the attack getting little coverage on state-controlled television.
Russia-1 TV channel Sunday evening spent a little over a minute on it with a brief Defence Ministry statement read out before images shifted to Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian positions.
Zelenskyy said the setbacks for the Kremlin would help force it to the negotiating table, even as its pursues a summer offensive on the battlefield.
“Russia must feel what its losses mean. That is what will push it toward diplomacy,” he said Monday in Vilnius, Lithuania, meeting with leaders from the Nordic nations and countries on NATO’s eastern flank.
Ukraine has occasionally struck air bases hosting Russia’s nuclear capable strategic bombers since early in the war, prompting Moscow to redeploy most of them to the regions farther from the front line.
Because Sunday’s drones were launched from trucks close to the bases in five Russian regions, military defences had virtually no time to prepare for them.
Many Russian military bloggers chided the military for its failure to build protective shields for the bombers despite previous attacks, but the large size of the planes makes that challenging.
The attacks were “a big blow to Russian strategic airpower” and exposed significant vulnerabilities in Moscow’s military capabilities, said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Centre for European Policy Analysis, called it “the most audacious attack of the war” and “a military and strategic game-changer”.
“Battered, beleaguered, tired, and outnumbered, Ukrainians have, at minimal cost, in complete secrecy, and over vast distances, destroyed or damaged dozens, perhaps more, of Russia’s strategic bombers,” he said.
Front-line fighting and shelling grinds on
Zelenskyy said that “if the Istanbul meeting brings nothing, that clearly means strong new sanctions are urgently, urgently needed” against Russia.
International concerns about the war’s consequences, as well as trade tensions, drove Asian share prices lower Monday while oil prices surged.
Fierce fighting has continued along the roughly 1,000-kilometre front line, and both sides have hit each other’s territory with deep strikes.
Russian forces shelled Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, killing three people and injuring 19 others, including two children, regional officials said Monday.
Also, a missile strike and shelling around the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, killing five people and injured nine others, officials said.
Russian air defences downed 162 Ukrainian drones over eight Russian regions overnight, as well as over the Crimean Peninsula, Russia’s Defence Ministry said Monday. Moscow illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014.
Ukrainian air defences damaged 52 out of 80 drones launched by Russia overnight, the Ukrainian air force said.
