Russian and Ukrainian delegates met in Istanbul on Monday for their second set of direct peace talks, a day after Kyiv launched a shock drone attack on Russia’s nuclear-capable bombers, in an operation that President Volodymyr Zelensky said was a year and a half in the making.
After the initial round of discussions in the Turkish city last month – the first between the warring countries since soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion in early 2022 – both sides agreed to share their conditions for a full ceasefire and a potentially lasting peace. Zelensky said Sunday that Ukraine had presented Moscow with its “logical and realistic” demands, but said Russia had not yet shared its memorandum.
“We don’t have it,” Zelensky said. “The Turkish side doesn’t have it, and the American side doesn’t have the Russian document either. Despite this, we will attempt to achieve at least some progress on the path toward peace.”
It is not yet clear if Ukraine’s daring Sunday air raid will streamline that path or make it more thorny. Kyiv has long sought to impress upon the Kremlin that there are costs to prolonging its campaign, but some analysts have warned that the operation – which struck Russian airfields thousands of miles from Ukraine’s borders – will only replenish Moscow’s resolve.
The mission, codenamed “Spiderweb,” was one of the most significant blows that Ukraine has landed against Russia in more than three years of full-scale war. Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, said it had smuggled the drones into Russia, hiding them in wooden mobile homes latched onto trucks. The roofs were then remotely opened, and the drones deployed to launch their strikes on four Russian airfields across the vast country.
Vasul Malyuk, the head of the SBU, said the attack caused an estimated $7 billion in damage and had struck 34% of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers – a total of 41 aircraft. These targets were “completely legitimate,” Malyuk said, stressing that Russia had used the planes throughout the conflict to pummel Ukraine’s “peaceful cities.”
The operation has provided a much-needed boost to morale in Ukraine, which has come under fierce Russian bombardment since peace talks began in mid-May, and is bracing for an expected summer offensive. Moscow launched a record 472 drones at Ukraine overnight into Sunday, only hours before the Ukrainian attack, according to Ukrainian officials.
At a summit in Lithuania on Monday, an upbeat Zelensky said the operation proved that Ukraine has “stronger tactical solutions” than Russia.
“This is a special moment – on the one hand, Russia has launched its summer offensive, but on the other hand, they are being forced to engage in diplomacy,” Zelensky said.
The talks in Istanbul are a test of how genuine that engagement is. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed holding “direct talks” with Ukraine in Turkey, but didn’t show up, despite Zelensky agreeing to meet. In the end, Moscow sent a low-level delegation to negotiate instead.
In the latest sign of his frustration that the war he pledged to end in a day is showing little sign of stopping, US President Donald Trump said last week that Putin had gone “absolutely crazy,” after Moscow launched the largest aerial attack of the war.
Trump has repeatedly told Russia and Ukraine there will be consequences if they don’t engage in his peace process, although he has so far resisted growing calls from lawmakers in his Republican Party to use sanctions to pressure Putin into winding down his war.
Speaking in Lithuania, Zelensky said that if Monday’s meeting “brings nothing, that clearly means strong new sanctions are urgently, urgently needed.”
