Reuters. Ukraine's chief negotiators met with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Wednesday (July 23) ahead of their first peace talks with Russia in more than seven weeks.
The Kremlin played down expectations of any breakthrough at the meeting, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said this week should focus in part on preparing a summit between himself and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Previous talks on May 16 and June 2 led to the exchange of thousands of prisoners of war and the remains of dead soldiers.
But those meetings lasted less than three hours in total and made no breakthrough towards ending the war that started with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
