Russia demands harsh terms at Ukraine peace talks
ISTANBUL − Russia told Ukraine at peace talks that it would only agree to end the war if Kyiv gives up big new chunks of territory and accepts limits on the size of its army, according to a memorandum reported by Russian media on June 2.
The terms, formally presented at negotiations in Istanbul, highlighted Moscow's refusal to compromise on its longstanding war goals despite calls by President Donald Trump to end the "bloodbath" in Ukraine.
Ukraine has repeatedly rejected the Russian conditions as tantamount to surrender.
More: Russia's 'Pearl Harbor': What to know Ukraine's audacious drone strike
Delegations from the warring sides met for barely an hour, for only the second such round of negotiations since March 2022. They agreed to exchange more prisoners of war - focusing on the youngest and most severely wounded - and return the bodies of 12,000 dead soldiers.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan described it as a great meeting and said he hoped to bring together Russia's Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a meeting in Turkey with Trump.
But there was no breakthrough on a proposed ceasefire that Ukraine, its European allies and Washington have all urged Russia to accept.
Moscow says it seeks a long-term settlement, not a pause in the war; Kyiv says Putin is not interested in peace. Trump has said the United States is ready to walk away from its mediation efforts unless the two sides demonstrate progress towards a deal.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, who headed Kyiv's delegation, said Kyiv - which has drawn up its own peace roadmap - would review the Russian document, on which he offered no immediate comment.
Ukraine has proposed holding more talks before the end of June, but believes only a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin can resolve the many issues of contention, Umerov said.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine presented a list of 400 children it says have been abducted to Russia, but that the Russian delegation agreed to work on returning only 10 of them. Russia says the children were moved from war zones to protect them.
The Russian memorandum, which was published by the Interfax news agency, said a settlement of the war would require international recognition of Crimea - a peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 - and four other regions of Ukraine that Moscow has claimed as its own territory. Ukraine would have to withdraw its forces from all of them.
It restated Moscow's demands that Ukraine become a neutral country - ruling out membership of NATO - and that it protect the rights of Russian speakers, make Russian an official language and enact a legal ban on glorification of Nazism. Ukraine rejects the Nazi charge as absurd and denies discriminating against Russian speakers.
Russia also formalized its terms for any ceasefire en route to a peace settlement, presenting two options that both appeared to be non-starters for Ukraine.
Option one, according to the text, was for Ukraine to start a full military withdrawal from the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Of those, Russia fully controls the first but holds only about 70% of the rest.
Option two was a package that would require Ukraine to cease military redeployments and accept a halt to foreign provision of military aid, satellite communications and intelligence. Kyiv would also have to lift martial law and hold presidential and parliamentary elections within 100 days.
Russian delegation head Vladimir Medinsky said Moscow had also suggested a "specific ceasefire of two to three days in certain sections of the front" so that the bodies of dead soldiers could be collected.
According to a proposed roadmap drawn up by Ukraine, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Kyiv wants no restrictions on its military strength after any peace deal, no international recognition of Russian sovereignty over parts of Ukraine taken by Moscow's forces, and reparations.
The conflict has been heating up, with Russia launching its biggest drone attacks of the war and advancing on the battlefield in May at its fastest rate in six months.
On Sunday, Ukraine said it launched 117 drones in an operation codenamed "Spider's Web" to attack Russian nuclear-capable long-range bomber planes at airfields in Siberia and the far north of the country.
Satellite imagery suggested the attacks had caused substantial damage, although the two sides gave conflicting accounts of the extent of it.
Western military analysts described the strikes, thousands of miles from the front lines, as one of the most audacious Ukrainian operations of the war.
Russia's strategic bomber fleet forms part of the "triad" of forces - along with missiles launched from the ground or from submarines - that make up the country's nuclear arsenal, the biggest in the world. Faced with repeated warnings from Putin of Russia's nuclear might, the U.S. and its allies have been wary throughout the Ukraine conflict of the risk that it could spiral into World War Three.
A current U.S. administration official said Trump and the White House were not notified before the attack. A former administration official said Ukraine, for operational security reasons, regularly does not disclose to Washington its plans for such actions.
A UK government official said the British government also was not told ahead of time.
Zelenskyy said the operation, which involved drones concealed inside wooden sheds, had helped to restore partners' confidence that Ukraine is able to continue waging the war.
"Ukraine says that we are not going to surrender and are not going to give in to any ultimatums," he told an online news briefing.
"But we do not want to fight, we do not want to demonstrate our strength - we demonstrate it because the enemy does not want to stop."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What's Russia demanding in Ukraine peace talks?
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