IN ISTANBUL, RUSSIA AND UKRAINE TALK PEACE BUT ARE STILL FAR APART ON TRUCE

While agreements were reached on prisoner exchange, there has been no word on talks to potentially end the conflict; a 'full and unconditional ceasefire' remains central to Ukraine's agenda; Russia says the 'root cause' of the conflict, NATO's expansion, should be addressed for durable peace

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A much-awaited meeting between the Ukrainian government delegation and their Russian counterparts, on Monday, ended within an hour and with little progress in negotiating the end to the war that started in 2022.

While agreements were reached on prisoner exchange, there has been no word on talks to potentially end the decades-long conflict.

The slow pace of the talks was attributed to the lackadaisical effort from the Russian delegation that refused to share their agenda with the negotiating teams ahead of the meetings. “We didn’t receive the document until the meeting began. And therefore, we can’t provide any feedback until we have had the chance to study it,” Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainian Minister of Defence, said at the end of the meetings.

Organised under the aegis of the government of Turkiye, this was the second such meeting in Istanbul in the past month, between two warring parties and came less than a day after a large-scale Ukrainian attack on Russian military infrastructure.

Operation Spiderweb

Ukraine claimed that their attack, codenamed 'Operation Spiderweb', targeted over 40 planes, including surveillance and bomber aircraft, across several Russian bases, even as far east as Siberia. The resulting damage is estimated to be in billions of dollars for Russia.

The impact of this intrepidity was undeniable felt at the Çırağan Palace, overlooking the Bosphorus sea, in Istanbul, as interactions between the rival delegations remained tense.

“The war goes on,” an official from the Ukrainian embassy in Turkiye said when asked about the drone attack. “Ukraine had proposed a ceasefire on March 11. And if Russia agreed to it, I guess their planes would be intact right now,” he said, adding that the Russians remained deterrent to the idea of pausing conflicts.In fact, a “full and unconditional ceasefire on land, at sea and in the air” remained a key demand and central to the Ukrainian agenda.