Russia, Ukraine agree to prisoner swap in first direct talks in years

BERLIN – After days of confusion and theatrics, direct peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators took place Friday in Istanbul for the first time since the start of the war, resulting in an agreement to conduct what would be the largest prisoner swap of the conflict.

After the negotiations, which lasted an hour and 40 minutes, leaders of the Ukrainian and Russian delegations confirmed in news briefings that they had agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners each soon.

But the two sides failed to broker a temporary ceasefire that Ukraine has sought or a meeting between their two leaders, demonstrating how far apart the warring parties remained on steps toward ending the conflict.

During the talks, the Russian team told the Ukrainians that, to achieve the ceasefire they are seeking, Ukraine should withdraw entirely from the four regions in east Ukraine that Moscow annexed in late 2022, according to a Turkish official familiar with the discussions. Ukraine still controls vast swaths of that land, including two regional capitals.

Such demands – which Russian officials also made during meetings with U.S. negotiators this year – have fed fears that Moscow is being unrealistic in talks and called into question whether President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has said he is winning on the battlefield, is, in fact, prepared to end the war.

Putin wants to keep the attention of President Donald Trump, who is promising a new era of warm ties between Moscow and Washington, and to convince the White House that he isn’t stonewalling the peace in Ukraine that Trump promised as a presidential candidate.

But the Russian leader is also still seeking Ukraine’s capitulation, both on the battlefield and in negotiations, after more than three years of full-scale war that has come to define his rule.

On Friday, the delegations agreed to write up and share with each other the conditions that would make a ceasefire possible, Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, whose government convened the talks, wrote on the social platform X. The Ukrainians and Russians also agreed to meet again, in principle, Fidan said.

“We agreed that each side would present its vision of a possible future ceasefire and would spell it out in detail,” Vladimir Medinsky, the Kremlin aide leading the Russian delegation, said in a news briefing after the talks.

“After such a vision is presented, we believe it would be appropriate to also agree to continue our talks on this.”

But in comments on Russian state television, Medinsky also said that those who say a ceasefire must come before peace talks had no knowledge of history. He said, as Napoleon Bonaparte proved, “war and negotiations, as a rule, always happen simultaneously.”

Medinsky, in the news briefing, said his team had noted Ukraine’s request for direct negotiations between Putin and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. He did not commit to arranging such a meeting.

Putin has repeatedly attacked Zelenskyy’s legitimacy and would be unlikely to agree to one-on-one talks with him. The two have met only once, in 2019, before Putin’s full-scale invasion.

Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, who led Ukraine’s delegation, confirmed that the teams had discussed the prisoner exchange, a ceasefire and the possibility of organizing a meeting of the two leaders.

“At this stage, we’d like to reiterate that Ukraine wants peace,” Umerov said after the talks. “We’re able and capable of continuing to fight, but at the end of the day, we need to finalize this war.”

Zelenskyy, during a trip to a summit in Albania on Friday, said Putin was “afraid” to meet him in person and had turned the Istanbul talks into a “staged, empty process.” The Ukrainian leader demanded new sanctions against Russia’s energy sector and banks until Moscow engaged in what he called serious diplomacy.

“Pressure must continue to rise until real progress is made,” Zelenskyy said.

President Emmanuel Macron of France echoed the sentiment, calling Friday for “increased pressure from the Europeans and Americans” on Russia to obtain a ceasefire.

Zelenskyy and Macron, alongside the leaders of Britain, Germany and Poland, spoke by phone with Trump about the matter Friday, according to Serhiy Nikiforov, the Ukrainian president’s press secretary, who did not release additional details.

From the start, the Istanbul negotiations were not expected to yield any huge breakthroughs. But the meeting was a tactical win for Putin, who managed to start the talks without first agreeing to a battlefield ceasefire that Ukraine and almost all of its Western backers had sought as a precondition for negotiations.

Despite encouraging the talks earlier in the week, Trump undercut them in comments Thursday, saying that nothing meaningful would happen until he met with Putin. On Friday, Trump said he might call the Russian leader and would meet him “as soon as we can set it up.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated that sentiment, calling it “abundantly clear” that a breakthrough wouldn’t occur until a meeting between the U.S. and Russian leaders took place.

“I don’t think anything productive is actually going to happen from this point forward until they engage in a very frank and direct conversation, which I know President Trump is willing to do,” Rubio said on Thursday.

On Friday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow agreed that a meeting between the Russian and U.S. leaders was necessary. But he noted that such a summit would require careful preparation to yield results.

Despite those sentiments, Rubio traveled to the Istanbul palace where the talks took place early Friday. U.S. officials met with the Ukrainians and Russians separately but left it to Turkey to convene direct talks in the afternoon. Rubio left the palace to meet national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany and did not stay for the talks.

Pope Leo XIV extended an offer to host subsequent talks between Ukraine and Russia at the Vatican. The Holy See’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said Friday the pope’s offer “is the availability of a space.” He called the Vatican an “appropriate place” for peace talks.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.