Ukraine and Russia agree to new prisoner exchange in Istanbul

Irish Times

2 days ago

Ukraine
and
Russia
agreed to hold a new prisoner exchange and swapped memorandums on a possible ceasefire to end
Vladimir Putin's
three-year war, despite a gulf remaining between the two sides' positions at a meeting in Istanbul on Monday.
After talks at the Çırağan Palace on the Bosphorus, Kyiv's and Moscow's delegations said they had agreed to swap all seriously wounded and sick prisoners, as well as prisoners of war under 25.
The talks, which lasted for just more than an hour, were the second round of negotiations brokered by
Turkey
and the
US
after the peace process resumed last month for the first time since early in the conflict.
Turkish president
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
said the meeting was 'great' and added that he would move to organise a summit involving Mr Putin, Ukraine's president
Volodymyr Zelenskiy
and US president
Donald Trump
.
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Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia's delegation, said the upcoming exchange, set to involve '1,000 to 1,200' prisoners, would be the largest since the war began, adding that Russia was 'satisfied with the results' of the talks.
But the two delegations did not shake hands and suggested they had made little progress on any potential deal as Mr Putin refuses to budge from his demands to cut down Ukraine's sovereignty or accept Kyiv's calls for a ceasefire.
Vladimir Medinsky (secon from right), head of the Russian delegation, delivers a statement to the press after a second round of direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegates. Photograph: Getty Images
Mr Medinsky said Moscow had offered a ceasefire for 'two to three days' on 'specific areas of the front' that would allow the sides to pick up the dead.
Ukraine's delegation said that Russia had rejected its proposal for an unconditional ceasefire and for the US to be more involved in the talks after Mr Trump suggested he might attend to bring Mr Putin and Mr Zelenskiy together.
Kyiv also said Russia only handed over its memorandum on a possible path to end the war at the meeting and declined to comment on it further.
After the meeting, a senior Ukrainian official said that no major breakthroughs had been achieved, 'just minor steps as we expected'. The official added: 'It seems they're staging a picture of diplomacy for Trump.'
Rustem Umerov, Ukraine's defence minister, said Kyiv's delegation gave Moscow a list of several hundred Ukrainian children who were deported to Russia during the war.
Mr Medinsky said Russia would work to reunite stranded children with their families in Ukraine when possible but accused Kyiv of turning the issue into a 'shameful show' for the Europeans.
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Russia's intransigence has frustrated the US president, who had bragged that he could solve the conflict on his first day in office and thought his close relationship with Mr Putin could help broker a deal.
Instead, Russia dismissed a 22-point US peace plan and held fast to its demands, prompting Mr Trump to suggest the US would take a back seat in the peace process after the first round of talks in May.
On Sunday, Ukraine launched one of its most daring military operations of the war, hitting dozens of Russian aircraft at four airfields as far away from the front line as eastern Siberia.
Those attacks themselves came just hours after Russia launched its largest drone strike on Ukraine since 2022, attacking the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia with 472 unmanned aerial vehicles.
Remarks by Mr Medinsky other senior Kremlin officials in the weeks following the first meeting indicated that Moscow was not prepared to budge from its insistence on solving the 'root causes' of the conflict.
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Mr Putin has previously demanded that Ukraine withdraw from four regions partly controlled by Russia — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — accept caps on its armed forces, and pledge never to join Nato.
During the first round of talks, Mr Medinsky made what Ukrainian officials called 'unacceptable' territorial demands and threatened that Russia would conquer more regions if its conditions were not met.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov also said after the first round of talks that Moscow wanted Kyiv to enshrine protections for Russian speakers in the country and roll back much of the legislation passed under Mr Zelenskiy's government.
Ukraine argued that those conditions would amount to surrender and the end of its existence as a sovereign state.
Russia has also downplayed the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between Mr Putin, Mr Zelenskiy and Mr Trump, saying such a summit could only be planned after results were reached at the talks in Istanbul. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025