No breakthrough as talks between Ukraine and Russia last just over an hour

Delegations from Russia and Ukraine have met for a second round of direct peace talks in just over two weeks, but the discussion lasted barely an hour and produced no major progress towards ending the three-year-old war, officials said.

The talks in Turkey unfolded a day after a string of long-range attacks by both sides, with Ukraine launching a devastating drone assault on Russian air bases and Russia making its largest drone attack of the war against Ukraine.

At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memo setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.

Defence 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 30, he said.

After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested 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 alternative way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilisation efforts and freeze western arms deliveries, conditions that were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The document also suggests 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 recognise Russian as an 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 the bodies of 6,000 soldiers killed in action and set up a commission to exchange seriously wounded troops.

Kyiv officials said a surprise drone attack on 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 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, head of the Ukrainian security service, who led its planning.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr 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 defences. That was part of a recently escalating campaign of strikes in civilian areas of Ukraine.

US-led efforts to push the two sides into accepting a ceasefire have so far failed. Ukraine accepted the proposed truce, but the Kremlin effectively rejected it. Recent comments by senior officials in both countries indicate they remain far apart on the key conditions for stopping the war.

The previous talks on May 16 in Istanbul were the first direct peace negotiations since the early weeks of Moscow’s 2022 invasion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the fact that the two sides met again on Monday was an achievement in itself.

Mr Zelensky said a new release of prisoners of war was being prepared after the meeting. The May 16 talks also led to a swap of prisoners, with 1,000 on both sides being exchanged.

Ukraine also handed Russia an official list of children it says were forcibly deported and must be returned, said Andriy Yermak, head of Mr Zelensky’s office.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.

The head of the Russian delegation said Kyiv had made a “show” out of the topic and children would be returned if their parents or guardians could be located. He said 339 children were named on the list.

Mr Zelensky said that “if Russia turns the Istanbul meeting into an empty talk, there must be a new level of pressure, new sanctions, and not just from Europe”, in an apparent reference to US threats to further penalise Russia.

“Without pressure, Putin will just keep playing games with everyone who wants this war to end,” he said.

Ukraine was triumphant after targeting the distant Russian air bases. The official Russian response was muted, with the attack getting little coverage on state-controlled television.

Mr Zelensky said the setbacks for the Kremlin would help force it to the negotiating table, even as its pursues a summer offensive on the battlefield.

“Russia must feel what its losses mean. That is what will push it toward diplomacy,” he said on Monday in Vilnius, Lithuania, as he met leaders from the Nordic nations and countries on Nato’s eastern flank.

Ukraine has occasionally struck air bases hosting Russia’s nuclear-capable strategic bombers since early in the war, prompting Moscow to redeploy most of them to the regions farther from the front line.

Because Sunday’s drones were launched from trucks close to the bases in five Russian regions, military defences had virtually no time to prepare for them.

Many Russian military bloggers criticised the military for its failure to build protective shields for the bombers despite previous attacks, but the large size of the planes makes that challenging.

Mr Zelensky said earlier that “if the Istanbul meeting brings nothing, that clearly means strong new sanctions are urgently, urgently needed” against Russia.

Fierce fighting has continued along the 620-mile front line, and both sides have hit each other’s territory with deep strikes.

Russian forces shelled Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, killing three people and wounding 19 others, including two children, regional officials said on Monday.

Also, a missile strike and shelling around the southern city of Zaporizhzhia killed five people and wounded nine others, officials said.

Russian air defences downed 162 Ukrainian drones over eight Russian regions overnight, as well as over the Crimean peninsula, Russia’s Defence Ministry said.

Ukrainian air defences damaged 52 out of 80 drones launched by Russia overnight, the Ukrainian air force said.