Moscow, March 28,(dpa/GNA) – Face-to-face peace negotiations between delegations from Ukraine and Russia could take place in Istanbul on Tuesday, says the Kremlin.
“Today they will probably not continue there,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, according to the Interfax news agency. “We expect that, theoretically, it could happen tomorrow.”
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, had said that a new round of face-to-face meetings was planned to start on Tuesday, after about two weeks of online negotiations. The Ukrainian side initially spoke of a start to the negotiations as early as Monday.
Later, the newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda, citing its own sources, reported that the delegations would travel to Istanbul on Monday, but would not begin talks until Tuesday.
According to Peskov, a face-to-face meeting would allow for more substantive negotiations than a video link. However, Peskov also said: “So far, unfortunately, we can’t foresee any significant successes or breakthroughs.”
In more than a month of the war, negotiators from Ukraine and Russia have met three times in the border region of Belarus. Talks then shifted online. On Sunday, the Turkish presidential office named Istanbul the venue for the next talks.
Kiev wants a withdrawal of Russian troops and security guarantees. Moscow is demanding that Ukraine: renounce any hopes of NATO membership; that breakaway eastern Ukrainian regions be recognized as autonomous; and that the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, annexed in 2014, be recognized as part of Russia.
Ukraine’s deputy head of government said that no escape corridors for the evacuation of civilians will be possible in Ukrainian cities on Monday, due to the threat posed by the Russian military.
Deputy Prime Minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said there was intelligence about possible “provocations” in those areas.
Ukraine has accused Russia of weeks of sabotaging the evacuation of civilians from particularly contested areas. Russia blames Ukraine for the repeated failure to agree on safe corridors.
Pravda cited various regional administrations as saying that Russian shelling, was ongoing in various parts of the country. In the region around Kiev, there have been missile strikes and fighting along a motorway.
In Chernihiv in the north, Ukrainian soldiers repelled Russian attacks during the night.
The regions of Zhytomyr and Kharkiv were also hit with rockets and bombs.
Last week, the parliament in Kiev reported several large fires in the restricted area around the now-defunct Chernobyl power plant, which is largely controlled by Russian troops.
But the civil defence service said that satellite images it had reviewed had not detected any such heat sources, and that information to the contrary was wrong.
After a devastating nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, a large dome was built over the destroyed reactor. Radioactive waste is still stored there today.
Since the beginning of the Russian war in Ukraine, at least 143 children have been killed and 216 injured, the human rights commissioner of the Ukrainian parliament said on Telegram on Monday.
The information could not be independently verified.
Also on Monday, the European judicial authority Eurojust announced it has joined forces with Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine to set up an international team of investigators into war crimes in Ukraine.
The countries have agreed to cooperate in the exchange of information and evidence regarding possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, Eurojust announced in The Hague.
GNA