Representatives from Russia and Ukraine have concluded their third in-person meeting “about 40 minutes” since their start in Istanbul, Russian state news agency TASS reported Wednesday, citing sources.
The meeting comes days after President Donald Trump gave Moscow a 50-day deadline, turning peace into a “very strict tariff.”
With Russian President Vladimir Putin not publicly admitting Trump’s ultimatum, Moscow continues to smash Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles, with ground forces moving forward east.
Two previous talks held in Istanbul in May and June helped to promote the exchange of the bodies of thousands of prisoners and dead soldiers, but made little progress in the potential ceasefire agreement.
Before his latest speech on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that both sides’ negotiating positions remained “the opposite” as they were trying to downplay expectations.
“No one expects an easy path. That’s going to be a very difficult argument,” Peskov said Wednesday. A day ago, he told reporters not to expect a “miraculous breakthrough.”
Peskov confirmed that the Moscow delegation remains the same as in the previous round of speech, led by Vladimir Medinsky, former Minister of Culture and now Senior Assistant to Putin.
Rustem Umerov, former Ukrainian defense minister, led the Kyiv delegation after leading the previous two.
Last month, Russian casualties hit a tough milestone, and the UK’s Defense Ministry estimates that Putin’s war likely cost more than 1 million casualties since the start of a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
That number was tracked in the same month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, DC, with the number of casualties coming to 950,000, predicting that “Russia is likely to reach 1 million casualties in the summer of 2025.”
Despite these losses, the Russian president shows little indication of compromising his greatest war purpose: to dismantle Ukrainian sovereignty. In a lengthy essay published months before the full-scale invasion, Putin mistakenly claimed that Russia and Ukraine were one country. His comments suggest to many that a war was fought to make it a reality.
In addition to Trump’s new threats to new sanctions against Russia and other countries that buy Russian oil if peace does not reach 50 days, the US has also secured a contract through European allies to concentrate new weapons in Kiev. The move was in stark contrast to the previous approaches US leaders took in the conflict.
Trump’s reversal comes after the European Union proposed lowering the price cap on Russian oil exports and announced a new sanctions package that proposes introducing a complete ban on Russian banks and financial institutions in third countries that will help Russia dodge existing sanctions.
It is unclear whether Trump’s latest decision will shake up Moscow’s approach, but his troubles could provide much needed boost to the Ukrainian military’s financial resources, indicating a growing frustration with Putin.
“My conversation with him is so much fun, and then the missiles go away at night,” Trump explained last week.
Before discussions, Ukrainian President Voldymir Zelensky repeated the call for a direct meeting with Putin, saying that only a meeting of two leaders could end the war.
