Headline Roundup • May 16th, 2025
Russia and Ukraine Hold First Direct Peace Talks Since 2022
Summary from the AllSides News Team
The first direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in over three years were held in Instanbul on Friday.
The Details: The talks ended with a large prisoner swap agreement but no ceasefire. Russia's Vladimir Medinsky said he was “satisfied with the outcome,” and Moscow was ready to continue contacts. Ukrainian sources said the other demands from Russia were “non-starters” and “detached from reality.” Russian media outlet RT (Lean Right bias) reported, “Ukraine’s demands for a higher-level Russian delegation are hard to understand, former Turkish diplomat Gulru Gezer has told RT, stressing that it’s not how negotiations work, or have ever worked in the history of diplomacy,” adding that the Russian delegation waited all day for its counterparts to arrive. In contrast, the Wall Street Journal (Center) said, “Zelensky, who unlike Putin accepted Trump’s call for an unconditional 30-day cease-fire, arrived in Turkey on Thursday with Ukraine’s entire national-security leadership.”
For Context: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Ukraine's top priority was a “full, unconditional, and honest ceasefire.” The Ukrainian delegation was led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, while the Russian delegation was headed by former culture minister Vladimir Lewinsky.
How The Media Covered It: The New York Post (Lean Right) emphasized the lack of progress and the unrealistic demands from Russia. The New York Times (Lean Left) pointed out that “Despite encouraging the talks earlier in the week, Mr. Trump undercut them in comments on Thursday, saying 'nothing is going to happen' until he meets with Mr. Putin.” RT said, “Zelensky, who had previously ruled out any talks with Moscow, only agreed to attend following US President Donald Trump’s announcement of his support for the talks, and his claim that Kiev should accept it 'immediately.'”
Revised by the AllSides staff (of humans) after a first draft from our custom AI. Learn more. Support our mission. Suggest an improvement to this summary.
Featured Coverage of this Story
After days of confusion and theatrics, direct peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators began on Friday in Istanbul for the first time since the start of the war.
The negotiations are not expected — even by President Trump, who supported them — to yield significant results. But the meeting itself is a win for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who refused to agree to a battlefield cease-fire that Ukraine and almost all of its Western backers had sought as a precondition for talks.
The first direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in more than three years lasted well under two hours, with no apparent sign of progress so far in narrowing the gap between the sides, and a Ukrainian source called Moscow’s demands “non-starters”.
Delegations from the warring sides met in Turkey on Friday, their first face-to-face meeting since March 2022, the month after Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.
The chasm between the two sides was quickly apparent, according to the Ukrainian source who told Reuters that Russia’s demands were “detached from...
Photo: TURKISH FOREIGN MINISTER PRESS OFFICE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Russian and Ukrainian delegations kicked off their first direct peace talks in three years amid a flurry of diplomatic activity marked by limited expectations and frustration in Kyiv and Western capitals with the junior level of the team dispatched by the Kremlin.
After more than three years of war, Russia and Ukraine remain wide apart, with President Vladimir Putin of Russia sticking to the original goal of the invasion: a neutered, Moscow-dominated Ukraine. Kyiv, shored up by Western aid, is holding the line on the battlefield and refuses to surrender.
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