Zelenskyy will try to revive peace talks on visit to Turkey

By MARIA VARENIKOVA and IVAN NECHEPURENKO

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said he planned to go Turkey on Wednesday to try to revive peace talks with Russia that have been stalled since the summer.

Ukrainian and Russian officials have not held direct negotiations for months, and efforts to end the war have reached a stalemate since the last round of talks between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia in August. Last month, Trump canceled a meeting with Putin in Budapest, Hungary, after he said the Russian president had no intention of making a deal to end the war.

“We are preparing to reinvigorate negotiations, and we have developed solutions that we will propose to our partners,” Zelenskyy, who was visiting Spain on Tuesday, said on social media. “Doing everything possible to bring the end of the war closer is Ukraine’s top priority.”

A spokesperson for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, said that Russian representatives would not be present but that Steve Witkoff, an envoy for Trump, would join the talks. “Russia continues to be open to the negotiation process,” Peskov said.

Russia has not budged on its demands that Ukraine hand over land in the east of the country, and the talks would take place as Ukraine’s military position is weakened. The Russian military is moving closer to capturing Pokrovsk, a strategic city in eastern Ukraine, and it continues to attack the country’s energy infrastructure, leaving people with regular power outages as winter approaches.

Overnight on Tuesday, Russia launched four ballistic missiles and 114 drones at Ukraine, killing at least five people and injuring dozens.

Zelenskyy said in his social media post that his government was working to restore exchanges of prisoners of war. Ukrainian analysts do not expect the talks to achieve significant progress toward ending the war, but previous meetings have led to deals to swap captives. The most recent exchange took place Oct. 2, when 185 Ukrainian prisoners were returned.

Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy, said Tuesday that he had discussed a possible prisoner exchange among many other issues with “some U.S. officials and members of the Trump team.” Dmitriev’s discussions were first reported by Axios.