Ukraine and Russia agree to swap dead and wounded troops but report no
progress toward ending war
[June 03, 2025]
By MEHMET GUZEL
ISTANBUL (AP) — Representatives of Russia and Ukraine met Monday for
their second round of direct peace talks in just over two weeks, but
aside from agreeing to swap thousands of their dead and seriously
wounded troops, they made no progress toward ending the 3-year-old war,
officials said.
The talks unfolded a day after a string of stunning long-range attacks
by both sides, with Ukraine launching a devastating drone assault on
Russian air bases and Russia hurling its largest drone attack of the war
against Ukraine.
At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the
Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.
Defense 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 June 30, he said.
After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti
published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested that
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 alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine
to halt its mobilization efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries,
conditions were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The document also suggests that 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
recognize Russian as the country's 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 6,000 bodies of soldiers
killed in action and to set up a commission to exchange seriously
wounded troops.
Kyiv officials said their surprise drone attack 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
7,000 kilometers (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, the head of
the Ukrainian security service, who led its planning.
Zelenskyy 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 defenses. That was part of a recently
escalating campaign of strikes in civilian areas of Ukraine.
Hopes low for peace prospects
U.S.-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 the same Turkish city 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 Monday was an achievement in itself amid the fierce
fighting.
“The fact that the meeting took place despite yesterday’s incident is an
important success in itself,” he said in a televised speech.
Zelenskyy said during a trip to Lithuania on Monday that a new release
of prisoners of war was being prepared after the Istanbul meeting. The
May 16 talks also led to a swap of prisoners, with 1,000 on both sides
being exchanged.
During the talks, Zelenskyy said, the Ukrainian delegation handed over a
list of nearly 400 abducted children. Russia responded by proposing to
“work on up to 10 children.”
"That’s their idea of addressing humanitarian issues,” Zelenskyy said
Monday during an online briefing with journalists.
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The head of the Russian delegation Vladimir Medinsky, center, speaks
to the media at the Ciragan Palace following the Ukraine-Russia
peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Emrah
Gurel)
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2023
for 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, Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to
Putin, said Kyiv had made a “show” out of the topic and that
children would be returned if their parents or guardians could be
located.
Zelenskyy also told journalists that the Russian side said it was
ready for a two- to three-day ceasefire to collect bodies from the
battlefield, not a full ceasefire.
"I think they’re idiots, because the whole point of a ceasefire is
to prevent people from being killed in the first place. So you can
see their mindset — it’s just a brief pause in the war for them,” he
added.
The relentless fighting has frustrated U.S. President Donald Trump’s
goal of bringing about a quick end to the war. A week ago, he
expressed impatience with Putin as Moscow pounded Kyiv and other
Ukrainian cities with drones and missiles for a third straight
night. Trump said on social media that Putin “has gone absolutely
CRAZY!”
Ukraine upbeat after strikes on air bases
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. The Russia-1
television channel on Sunday evening spent a little over a minute on
it with a brief Defense Ministry statement read out before images
shifted to Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian positions.
Zelenskyy 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 Monday in Vilnius, Lithuania, meeting
with 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 defenses had virtually no time to
prepare for them.
Many Russian military bloggers chided 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.
The attacks were “a big blow to Russian strategic air power” and
exposed significant vulnerabilities in Moscow’s military
capabilities, said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic
studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for
European Policy Analysis, called it “the most audacious attack of
the war” and "a military and strategic game-changer.”
“Battered, beleaguered, tired and outnumbered, Ukrainians have, at
minimal cost, in complete secrecy, and over vast distances,
destroyed or damaged dozens, perhaps more, of Russia’s strategic
bombers,” he said.
Front-line fighting and shelling grinds on
Fierce fighting has continued along the roughly 1,000-kilometer
(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 Monday.
Also, a missile strike and shelling around the southern city of
Zaporizhzhia killed five people and wounded nine others, officials
said.
___
Associated Press writers Suzan Frazer in Ankara, Turkey; Hanna
Arhirova in Kyiv, Ukraine; Geir Moulson in Berlin; and Katie Marie
Davies in Manchester, England, contributed to this report.
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