On June 2, Russian and Ukrainian representatives met in Istanbul, Turkey, for the second round of peace talks in about two weeks. The initial round last month ended after 90 minutes with little progress outside of an agreement to release prisoners on both sides. All of the major political issues, such as establishing a ceasefire, Ukraine’s future foreign policy trajectory, and the disposition of Russian military forces inside Ukraine were kicked down the road to a later date.
This week’s talks ended in a similar fashion. Again, no movement was detected on the major issues that have fueled the war into a fourth year. Coming a day after Kyiv conducted its most impressive drone attack inside Russia since the war began, one that took out as much as a third of Moscow’s cruise missile carriers (one Russian commentator called the attack Russia’s version of Pearl Harbor), Moscow was in no mood to compromise. Much like the first round, the Ukrainians and Russians walked away pledging to work toward the release of all wounded prisoners of war and those under 25 years old. The timeline to actually achieve this, however, wasn’t spelled out.
If anybody was anticipating movement on the big disputes, then you were asking for too much. Merely getting to a point where Ukrainian and Russian officials could sit at the same table took an excruciating amount of time and effort, including an Oval Office dressing down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and bilateral conversations between the U.S. and the Russians. Even then, it wasn’t easy; after Zelensky committed to talks, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin went back and forth about who they were going to send. In the end, Putin chose to skip the proceedings and ordered a lower-level Russian delegation to travel to Turkey, a snub to the Ukrainians, who viewed the presence of mid-level officials as a reflection of Moscow’s disinterest in diplomacy.
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