Moscow: Russia and Ukraine have scheduled no further direct talks on ending their more than three-year war, a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday, almost a week after the first face-to-face engagement between the countries’ delegations since 2022 and days after US President Donald Trump announced they would start ceasefire negotiations ‘immediately.’
“There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “They are yet to be agreed upon.”
During two hours of talks in Istanbul last Friday, Kyiv and Moscow agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, in what would be their biggest such swap. Apart from that step, the meeting delivered no significant breakthrough.
Several months of intensified US and European pressure on the two sides to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a settlement have yielded little progress. Meanwhile, Russia is readying a summer offensive to capture more Ukrainian land, Ukrainian government and military analysts say.
Putin said earlier this week that Moscow would “propose and is ready to work with” Ukraine on a “memorandum” outlining the framework for “a possible future peace treaty.” Putin has effectively rejected a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine has accepted. He has linked the possibility to a halt in Ukraine’s mobilisation effort and a freeze on Western arms shipments to Kyiv as part of a comprehensive settlement.
The major prisoner swap is a “quite laborious process” that “requires some time,” Peskov said.
But he added, “The work is continuing at a quick pace, everybody is interested in doing it quickly.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that preparations are underway for the potential prisoner exchange, which he described as “perhaps the only real result” of the talks in Turkey.
Peskov disputed a report Thursday in the Wall Street Journal that Trump told European leaders after his phone call with Putin on Monday that the Russian leader wasn’t interested in talks because he thinks that Russia is winning.
“We know what Trump told Putin, we don’t know what Trump told the Europeans. We know President Trump’s official statement,” Peskov said. “What we know contrasts with what was written in the article you mentioned.”
Apart from the continuing war of attrition along the roughly 1,000-kilometre front line, which has killed tens of thousands of troops on both sides, the warring parties have been firing dozens of long-range drones at each other’s territory almost daily.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said that it had shot down 105 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 35 over the Moscow region. It was the second straight night that Kyiv’s forces have targeted the Russian capital.
More than 160 flights were delayed across three of Moscow’s four main airports, the city’s transport prosecutor said, as officials grounded planes citing concerns for passenger safety.
The attack prompted some regions to turn off mobile internet signals, including the Oryol region southwest of Moscow, which was targeted heavily on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force said Russia launched 128 drones at Ukraine overnight.
Among the targets were Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, damaging an industrial facility, power lines, and several private homes, regional governor Serhii Lysak said on Telegram.
In Kyiv, debris from a Russian drone fell onto the grounds of a school in the capital’s Darnytskyi district, according to the head of the Kyiv City Military Administration, Tymur Tkachenko.
AP
