A second round of face-to-face talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials ended a little more than an hour after they started in Istanbul on Monday, TVP World reports.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, said after the talks that a new exchange of prisoners had been agreed. He also said the Russian delegation had handed over a memorandum that would be reviewed by Kyiv.
Umerov added that Ukraine had proposed a further round of talks before the end of June in order to make progress.
Prior to the Istanbul meeting, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had accused Moscow of stalling by failing to deliver its negotiating proposals, claiming Russia was engaged in "yet another deception".
Zelenskyy had said Kyiv sent its conditions to the Russians in "readiness for a full and unconditional ceasefire," but that Moscow had not reciprocated. He said this showed Moscow was "doing everything it can to ensure the next possible meeting is fruitless."
Following Monday’s meeting, Umerov said Kyiv believes the conflict’s key issues can only be resolved at the level of national leaders, Reuters reported.
Later, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Ankara would work towards brokering a meeting between the two heads of state.
"My desire is to bring (Vladimir) Putin and (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy together in Istanbul or Ankara,” Reuters reported him as saying. “Also to invite (U.S. President Donald) Trump to this meeting as well... We will take steps for this meeting after the latest talks."
The latest negotiations, brokered by the U.S. in an effort to bring the three-year war to an end, were supposedly aimed at establishing a peace roadmap. Hopes for a breakthrough in the stalemate were never high, however, after similar talks last month ended only with an agreement to exchange prisoners of war.
Meanwhile, President Zelenskyy called for fresh sanctions against Moscow at the level of the G7 group of wealthy nations. Speaking at a NATO meeting in Vilnius on Monday, he argued that “a new level of pressure, new sanctions” were needed to "seriously limit trade," otherwise "Putin will just keep playing games," the BBC reported.
Reuters reported that the two sides had agreed to an exchange of POWs with a focus on the seriously injured, and those aged under 25. They also agreed to exchange the bodies of fallen soldiers with 6,000 from each side to be returned.
In relation to the exchange of bodies, Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, told a press conference in Turkey that his delegation had proposed a truce of two to three days at specific sections of the front line in order to recover and bury their dead.
