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Nicosia: The United Nations is pushing for a breakthrough when Cyprus’s rival leaders meet in New York next week for a renewed attempt to revive stalled peace talks, an UN envoy said Monday.
Maria Angela Holguin held separate meetings with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar, crossing the island’s UN-patrolled ceasefire line in a day of shuttle diplomacy.
“All this effort the UN is doing is for the prosperity of the island, so that the people have a better life,” Holguin, who was appointed the UN envoy to Cyprus earlier this year, told reporters after meeting Tatar.
“And we continue to work, the commitment of the UN is totally for that, so we hope the leaders can think about that, and we have results next week.”
The meetings are part of preparations for talks in New York on July 16-17, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is due to meet both leaders.
They follow a meeting in Geneva in March, which marked the first meaningful progress in years.
At that gathering, both sides agreed on a set of confidence-building measures, including opening more crossing points across the divide, cooperating on solar energy, and removing land mines — steps Guterres described as reflecting a “new atmosphere” and renewed urgency.
“I hope we are going to have many advances on the measures they decided in March,” said Holguin.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognized only by Ankara.
The internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union, controls the island’s majority Greek Cypriot south.
The last major round of peace talks collapsed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July 2017.

KYIV: Russia said Monday it captured its first village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region after grinding toward the border for months, dealing a physchological blow for Kyiv as its worries mount.
Moscow launched a fresh large-scale drone and missile barrage before the announcement, including on Ukraine’s army recruitment centers, as part of an escalating series of attacks that come as ceasefire talks led by the United States stall.
The Russian defense ministry said its forces captured the village of Dachne in the Dnipropetrovsk region, an important industrial mining territory that has also come under mounting Russian air attacks.
Russian forces appear to have made crossing the border a key strategic objective over recent months, and deeper advances into the region could pose logistics and economic problems for Kyiv.
Kyiv has so far denied any Russian foothold in Dnipropetrovsk.
Moscow first said last month its forces had crossed the border, more than three years since launching its invasion and pushing through the neighboring Donetsk region.
Earlier Monday, Ukraine’s army said its forces “repelled” attacks in Dnipropetrovsk, including “in the vicinity” of Dachne.
Dnipropetrovsk is not one of the five Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea — that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.


Russia used its main city of Dnipro as a testing ground for its “experimental” Oreshnik missile in late 2024, claiming to have struck an aeronautics production facility.
An AFP reporter in the eastern city of Kharkiv saw civilians with their belongings being evacuated from a residential building damaged during Russia’s overnight attacks, and others sheltering with pets in a basement.
At least four people were killed and dozens wounded across Ukraine, mostly in the Kharkiv region bordering Russia and in a late-morning attack on the industrial city of Zaphorizhzhia.
“Air defense remains the top priority for protecting lives,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media after the attacks, as fears mount over the continuing deliveries of US military aid.
Zelensky said Ukraine was “strongly counting on our partners to fully deliver on what we have agreed.”
The air force said Moscow had launched 101 drones across the country and four missiles. Seventy-five of the drones were downed, it added.
Attacks on Monday targeted two recruitment centers in separate cities wounding four people, the Ukrainian army said, in what appears to be a new trend following similar strikes over the weekend and last week.
“These strikes are part of a comprehensive enemy operation aimed at disrupting mobilization in Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications, a government-funded body, wrote on social media.
It added that Russia had attacked recruitment centers last week in the cities of Kremenchuk, Kryvyi Rig, and Poltava.
In Russia, the defense ministry said that it had shot down 91 Ukrainian drones overnight, including eight in the Moscow region, with the majority of the rest in regions bordering Ukraine.