Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that the point of holding peace talks with Ukraine was to ensure a swift and complete Russian victory.
“The Istanbul talks are not for striking a compromise peace on someone else’s delusional terms but for ensuring our swift victory and the complete destruction of the neo-Nazi regime,” the hawkish deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council said on Telegram.
“That’s what the Russian Memorandum published yesterday is about.”
Medvedev was referring to a set of Russian demands presented to Ukraine at talks in Istanbul on Monday.
They included handing over more territory, becoming a neutral country, accepting limits on the size of the Ukrainian army and holding new parliamentary and presidential elections.
POW Swap
At the talks, which lasted only an hour, the two sides agreed on a new prisoner-of-war swap and an exchange of 12,000 dead soldiers, but not on the ceasefire that Ukraine and its allies are pressing Russia to accept.
Medvedev added, in an apparent response to Ukraine’s weekend strikes on Russian strategic bomber bases, that Moscow would take revenge. “Retribution is inevitable,” he said.
“Our Army is pushing forward and will continue to advance. Everything that needs to be blown up will be blown up, and those who must be eliminated will be.”
Istanbul Talks
Russian and Ukrainian delegations on Monday met for barely an hour in the Turkish city of Istanbul, for only the second such round of negotiations since March 2022.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan described it as a great meeting and said he hoped to bring together Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a meeting in Turkey with U.S. President Donald Trump.
But there was no breakthrough on a proposed ceasefire that Ukraine, its European allies and Washington have all urged Russia to accept.
Moscow says it seeks a long-term settlement, not a pause in the war; Kyiv says Putin is not interested in peace.
(With inputs from Reuters)
