Ukraine and Russia exchange peace memorandums in Istanbul

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Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul on Monday to exchange memorandums on a possible ceasefire to end Vladimir Putin’s three-year war, despite a gulf remaining between the two sides’ positions.

Delegations from Kyiv and Moscow met at the Çırağan Palace on the Bosphorus for the second round of talks brokered by Turkey and the US after the peace process resumed last month for the first time since early in the conflict.

Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s foreign minister, said the two sides planned to discuss a ceasefire, a potential meeting between the Russian president and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a prisoner exchange.

But the two delegations did not shake hands and offered little to suggest progress on any potential deal as Putin refuses to budge from his maximalist demands.

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.”

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 Putin could help broker a deal.

Instead, Russia dismissed a 22-point US peace plan and held fast to its demands, prompting 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 frontline 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. 

Ukraine’s delegation, led by defence minister Rustem Umerov, released a memorandum ahead of Monday’s meeting that proposed a full and unconditional ceasefire, guarantees for Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity, and confidence-building measures as the basis for a potential peace deal.

Russia refused to publish its memorandum or give it to Ukraine before the talks.

Remarks by Vladimir Medinsky, the senior aide to Putin heading up Russia’s delegation, and 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.

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, 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 Zelenskyy’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 Putin, Zelenskyy and Trump, saying such a summit could only be planned after results were reached at the talks in Istanbul.