The Russian delegation arrived at the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Thursday morning for further talks to normalise diplomatic contacts between the two states as part of the process of working towards a Ukraine peace deal.
A blacked-out minibus carrying Russian diplomats was admitted through the gates of the residence of the U.S. consul general in Istanbul, Turkey, on Thursday morning. The United States and Russia are having talks today on the continued process of normalisation of diplomatic relations between the nations, all but suspended during the Joe Biden presidency in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and re-embarked upon with the negotiations in Saudi Arabia last week.
A Kremlin spokesman said of the talks on Thursday morning: “Currently, a meeting on an expert level in Istanbul is underway, our diplomats are continuing the understanding reached in a phone conversation between the two presidents and the agreements reached in Riyadh by high-level delegations. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, details on the talks’ results will become available one way or another”.
Update 1330 GMT: President Putin says progress in talks “raises certain hopes”
Russian President Vladimir Putin threw out a little happy talk as the discussions in Istanbul continued on Thursday, Kremlin media claims. State wires service TASS relates he told a meeting of Russia’s domestic spy and security agency the FSB that:
We all see how rapidly the world is changing, the situation in the world. In this regard, I would like to note that the first contacts with the new US administration inspire certain hopes… There is a mutual dedication to work towards restoring interstate relations and gradually resolving the enormous volume of accumulated systemic and strategic problems in the global architecture.
It is these issues that provoked the Ukraine war in the first place, he claimed, neatly sidestepping his own decision to actually invade in 2022.
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Russia has expressed several times that it will judge how it expects the rest of the talks that will follow will progress based on the outcome of this meeting, at least implying that there are major decisions to be made today on the structure of future discussions. One of the key future points for the process will be a meeting of principals — an in-person discussion between President Trump and Russian President Putin — to do the final negotiation and come to an agreement.
Both sides have said they are open to this happening, but ahead of today’s talk Washington said no plans for that meeting were yet set in stone. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News there was nothing “on the books yet” but that “Steve Witkoff and Secretary [Marco] Rubio and our national security advisor, Mike Waltz, the president’s entire delegation, who he’s tasked with ending this conflict, had continued to be engaged with the Russians as well as the Ukrainians”.
Otherwise, most of the information about the scope of the future relationship this week has come from Kremlin spokesmen, who have been more talkative than their American counterparts. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke out on the potential for trade between Russia and the U.S. down the line, in comments clearly meant to encourage a Russian angle in the Ukraine-U.S. rare earths critical minerals deal.
He said at the Kremlin on Thursday morning that Putin sees “plenty of room for potential cooperation between Russian and American companies… Such room is in place, and companies’ interest exists. However, no detailed discussions on that have taken place yet”.
The names of those participating in the talks today has not been published by either participating nation, but the talks are held at the official residence of the U.S. consul general in Istanbul, which per the mission is diplomat Julie A. Eadeh.
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