Russia and Ukraine agree to prisoner exchange but little else in brief peace talks

Russia and Ukraine agreed to a new prisoner exchange but made little progress on other issues during a brief third round of peace talks in Istanbul on Wednesday, the heads of both countries’ delegations said.

Speaking at a press conference at the Çırağan Palace after the 40-minute meeting, Ukrainian delegation head Rustem Umerov said the two sides had agreed to a humanitarian exchange involving more than 1,200 prisoners of war and intended to “continue further” such exchanges.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a prisoner exchange involving “seriously ill and seriously wounded soldiers” had taken place on Wednesday evening, though the Russian Defence Ministry pointed out that it had been carried out under the agreements reached during the previous round of talks on 2 June.

While Ukraine continued to focus on its “priority issues” of “people, a ceasefire and a meeting of leaders”, Umerov said, Moscow had not agreed to the “full and unconditional ceasefire” that Kyiv sees as the “necessary basis for effective diplomacy”.

The Ukrainian delegation also proposed a meeting between Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — potentially mediated by US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — to take place by the end of August, Umerov said.

“If Russia accepts this proposal, it will clearly show the whole world, including our partners, that it has a constructive approach,” he said.

Russian delegation head Vladimir Medinsky confirmed that the sides had agreed to exchange at least 1,200 prisoners in the near future but said their positions on a broader peace agreement — outlined in draft memoranda exchanged during the last round of talks in June — remained “quite far apart”.

He appeared to cast doubt on the leaders’ summit proposed by Ukraine, stressing Moscow’s position that Putin and Zelensky should only meet to “finalise and sign” a peace deal, not to negotiate its terms. “There is no point in [the leaders] meeting to discuss everything from scratch again”, Medinsky said.

Rather than agreeing to the Ukrainian proposal of a full ceasefire, the Russian delegation instead offered to implement short truces of up to 48 hours to “allow medical teams to collect the wounded and commanders to recover the bodies of their soldiers” without the risk of drone strikes, he added.

Medinsky also said that Russia had proposed to return the bodies of some 3,000 Ukrainian servicemen, with work to repatriate 339 displaced Ukrainian children “ongoing”.

While in-person negotiations were expected to continue, Ukraine accepted Russia’s proposal to create three “working groups” that would meet online to discuss political, humanitarian and military issues in the meantime, he added.