No new direct Russia-Ukraine peace talks are scheduled, Kremlin says

May 23 ------ Russia and Ukraine have no direct peace talks scheduled, the Kremlin said, nearly a week after their first face-to-face session since shortly after Moscow’s invasion in 2022 and days after U.S. President Donald Trump said they would start ceasefire negotiations “immediately.” “There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “They are yet to be agreed upon.”  

During two hours of talks in Istanbul on May 16, Kyiv and Moscow agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, in what would be their biggest such swap. Apart from that step, the meeting delivered no significant breakthrough. Several months of intensified U.S. and European pressure on the two sides to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a settlement have yielded little progress. Meanwhile, Russia is readying a summer offensive to capture more Ukrainian land, Ukrainian government and military analysts say. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that preparations are underway for the potential prisoner exchange, which he described as “perhaps the only real result” of the talks in Turkey. Peskov disputed a report in The Wall Street Journal that Trump told European leaders after his phone call with Putin that the Russian leader wasn’t interested in talks because he thinks that Moscow is winning. “We know what Trump told Putin, we don’t know what Trump told the Europeans. We know President Trump’s official statement,” Peskov said. “What we know contrasts with what was written in the article you mentioned.” 

Source: apnews.com