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ISTANBUL: Representatives of Russia and Ukraine met Monday for their second round of direct peace talks in just over two weeks, but aside from agreeing to swap thousands of their dead and seriously wounded troops, they made no progress toward ending the 3-year-old war, officials said.
The talks unfolded a day after a string of stunning long-range attacks by both sides, with Ukraine launching a devastating drone assault on Russian air bases and Russia hurling its largest drone attack of the war against Ukraine.
At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.
Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who led the Ukrainian delegation, told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response. Ukraine proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30, he said.
After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured as a condition for a ceasefire.
As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilization efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The document also suggests that Ukraine stop any redeployment of forces and ban any military presence of third countries on its soil as conditions for halting hostilities.
The Russian document further proposes that Ukraine end martial law and hold elections, after which the two countries could sign a comprehensive peace treaty that would see Ukraine declare its neutral status, abandon its bid to join NATO, set limits on the size of its armed forces and recognize Russian as the country’s official language on par with Ukrainian.
Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow.
In other steps, the delegations agreed to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action and to set up a commission to exchange seriously wounded troops.
Kyiv officials said their surprise drone attack Sunday damaged or destroyed more than 40 warplanes at air bases deep inside Russia, including the remote Arctic, Siberian and Far East regions more than 7,000 kilometers (4,300 miles) from Ukraine.
The complex and unprecedented raid, which struck simultaneously in three time zones, took over a year and a half to prepare and was “a major slap in the face for Russia’s military power,” said Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the Ukrainian security service, who led its planning.
Zelensky called it a “brilliant operation” that would go down in history. The effort destroyed or heavily damaged nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia on Sunday fired the biggest number of drones — 472 — at Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s air force said, in an apparent effort to overwhelm air defenses. That was part of a recently escalating campaign of strikes in civilian areas of Ukraine.
Hopes low for peace prospects
US-led efforts to push the two sides into accepting a ceasefire have so far failed. Ukraine accepted the proposed truce, but the Kremlin effectively rejected it. Recent comments by senior officials in both countries indicate they remain far apart on the key conditions for stopping the war.
The previous talks on May 16 in the same Turkish city were the first direct peace negotiations since the early weeks of Moscow’s 2022 invasion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the fact that the two sides met again Monday was an achievement in itself amid the fierce fighting.
“The fact that the meeting took place despite yesterday’s incident is an important success in itself,” he said in a televised speech.
Zelensky said during a trip to Lithuania on Monday that a new release of prisoners of war was being prepared after the Istanbul meeting. The May 16 talks also led to a swap of prisoners, with 1,000 on both sides being exchanged.
Ukraine also handed Russia an official list of children it says were forcibly deported and must be returned, said Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s office.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2023 for Putin and the country’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Putin, said Kyiv had made a “show” out of the topic and that children would be returned if their parents or guardians could be located. He said 339 children were named on the list.
Zelensky said that “if Russia turns the Istanbul meeting into an empty talk, there must be a new level of pressure, new sanctions, and not just from Europe,” in an apparent reference to US threats to further penalize Russia.
“Without pressure, Putin will just keep playing games with everyone who wants this war to end,” he said.
The relentless fighting has frustrated US President Donald Trump’s goal of bringing about a quick end to the war. A week ago, he expressed impatience with Putin as Moscow pounded Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles for a third straight night. Trump said on social media that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
Ukraine upbeat after strikes on air bases
Ukraine was triumphant after targeting the distant Russian air bases. The official Russian response was muted, with the attack getting little coverage on state-controlled television. The Russia-1 television channel on Sunday evening spent a little over a minute on it with a brief Defense Ministry statement read out before images shifted to Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian positions.
Zelensky said the setbacks for the Kremlin would help force it to the negotiating table, even as its pursues a summer offensive on the battlefield.
“Russia must feel what its losses mean. That is what will push it toward diplomacy,” he said Monday in Vilnius, Lithuania, meeting with leaders from the Nordic nations and countries on NATO’s eastern flank.
Ukraine has occasionally struck air bases hosting Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers since early in the war, prompting Moscow to redeploy most of them to the regions farther from the front line.
Because Sunday’s drones were launched from trucks close to the bases in five Russian regions, military defenses had virtually no time to prepare for them.
Many Russian military bloggers chided the military for its failure to build protective shields for the bombers despite previous attacks, but the large size of the planes makes that challenging.
The attacks were “a big blow to Russian strategic air power” and exposed significant vulnerabilities in Moscow’s military capabilities, said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, called it “the most audacious attack of the war” and “a military and strategic game-changer.”
“Battered, beleaguered, tired and outnumbered, Ukrainians have, at minimal cost, in complete secrecy, and over vast distances, destroyed or damaged dozens, perhaps more, of Russia’s strategic bombers,” he said.
Front-line fighting and shelling grinds on
Fierce fighting has continued along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, and both sides have hit each other’s territory with deep strikes.
Russian forces shelled Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, killing three people and wounding 19 others, including two children, regional officials said Monday.
Also, a missile strike and shelling around the southern city of Zaporizhzhia killed five people and wounded nine others, officials said.