Ukraine, Russia agree to swap dead and wounded troops

ISTANBUL, June 4 ------ Representatives of Russia and Ukraine met for their second round of direct peace talks in just over two weeks, but aside from agreeing to swap thousands of their dead and seriously wounded troops, they made no progress toward ending the 3-year-old war, officials said.

The talks unfolded a day after a string of stunning long-range attacks by both sides, with Ukraine launching a devastating drone assault on Russian air bases and Russia hurling its largest drone attack of the war against Ukraine.At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin's terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.

Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who led the Ukrainian delegation, told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response. Ukraine proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30, he said. After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured as a condition for a ceasefire.

As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilization efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions 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 recognize Russian as the country's official language on par with Ukrainian.

Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow. In other steps, the delegations agreed to swap 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action and to set up a commission to exchange seriously wounded troops. Kyiv officials said their surprise drone attack Sunday damaged or destroyed more than 40 warplanes at air bases deep inside Russia, including the remote Arctic, Siberian and Far East regions more than 7,000 kilometers (4,300 miles) from Ukraine. The complex and unprecedented raid, which struck simultaneously in three time zones, took over a year and a half to prepare and was "a major slap in the face for Russia's military power," said Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the Ukrainian security service, who led its planning.

Zelensky called it a "brilliant operation" that would go down in history. The effort destroyed or heavily damaged nearly a third of Moscow's strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia on Sunday fired the biggest number of drones — 472 — at Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine's air force said, in an apparent effort to overwhelm air defenses. That was part of a recently escalating campaign of strikes in civilian areas of Ukraine.

Source: mb.com.ph