Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a new prisoner swap and the return of thousands of dead soldiers during direct talks in Istanbul, although little headway was made towards ending the war.
The rival delegations met on Monday at the Ottoman-era Ciragan Palace in the Turkish city, and officials confirmed that both sides will exchange prisoners of war and the remains of 6,000 soldiers killed in combat.
The Istanbul meeting, which lasted less than two hours, marked the second time the warring countries have convened for direct talks in less than a month, but expectations were low amid recent military escalations from both sides.
The first round of direct talks on May 16 also ended without a breakthrough, but the two sides agreed on a prisoner swap.
“The exchange of prisoners seems to be the diplomatic channel that actually works between Russia and Ukraine,” Al Jazeera correspondent Dmitry Medvedenko said, reporting from Istanbul.
“We’ve actually had exchanges of prisoners throughout this war, not in the numbers that have been happening as a result of these Istanbul talks,” Medvedenko added.
Prisoner exchange
Negotiators from both countries confirmed that they had reached a deal to swap all severely wounded soldiers as well as all captured fighters under the age of 25.
“We agreed to exchange all-for-all seriously wounded and seriously sick prisoners of war. The second category is young soldiers who are from 18 to 25 years old – all for all,” Ukraine’s lead negotiator and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told reporters in Istanbul.
Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said the swap would involve “at least 1,000” on each side – topping the 1,000 for 1,000 POW exchange agreed at talks in May.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking from Vilnius, Lithuania, said the two parties “exchanged documents through the Turkish side” and Kyiv was preparing for the next group of captives to be released.
He also said his negotiators had given their Russian counterparts a list of nearly 400 abducted Ukrainian children that Kyiv wanted Moscow to return home, but that the Russian delegation agreed to work on returning only 10 of them.
Limited or unconditional ceasefire?
As for a truce, Russia and Ukraine remain sharply divided.
“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.
For its part, Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.
“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” Russia’s lead negotiator Medinsky said, adding that this was needed to collect the bodies of dead soldiers from battlefields.
However, Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Al Jazeera he was not very optimistic about the talks in Istanbul.
“Russia clearly shows that they don’t want to end the war because Ukraine proposed a 30-days ceasefire in March, and the American and Europe proposition was the same, but only one country [Russia] refused,” Goncharenko said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has ramped up its military efforts far beyond the front lines, claiming responsibility for drone attacks on Sunday that it said damaged or destroyed more than 40 Russian warplanes.
The operation successfully targeted airbases in three distant regions – the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East – thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said the setback for Russia’s military would increase pressure on Moscow to return to the negotiating table.
Russia’s new ‘memorandum’
At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.
Ukraine’s Defence Minister Umerov told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response.
After the talks, Russian state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested as a condition for a ceasefire that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four Ukrainian regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured.
As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilisation efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions that 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 recognise Russian as the country’s official language on par with Ukrainian.
Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow.
Looking ahead, Ukraine has proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30. Zelenskyy has repeatedly said he is ready to meet with Putin.
Andrey Fedorov, a former deputy foreign minister of Russia, says little progress was made in Monday’s talks and the rival sides are still at odds on key points.
“All the main political questions were left unopened,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that while both sides presented the other with memorandums for peace proposals, they were “very contradictory to each other”.
Trump ready to join Putin, Zelenskyy
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the talks “magnificent”.
“My greatest wish is to bring together Putin and Zelenskyy in Istanbul or Ankara and even add [United States President Donald] Trump along,” he said.
Both Trump and Putin have said for months they are eager to meet each other, but no date has been set.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Monday said that Trump was “open” to a leader-level meeting with Zelenskyy and Putin. Trump is “open to it and wants leaders to sit down at the table”, Leavitt said replying to a question.
Trump, after piling heavy pressure on Ukraine and clashing with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, has lately expressed growing impatience that Putin may be “tapping me along.”
“Nothing’s going to happen until Putin and I get together,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One on May 15.
Then, on May 26, Trump described Putin as “absolutely crazy” after Moscow launched its largest aerial attack of the war on Ukraine, killing at least 13 people.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump’s unpredictability has often provoked dismay from Ukraine and its European allies.
