US President Donald Trump called for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin after the first direct peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in more than three years ended without a breakthrough.
Trump said during an interview with Fox News on May 16 that the meeting with Putin is needed to end Europe's longest conflict since World War II after delegations from Moscow and Kyiv failed to make progress on a cease-fire in Istanbul earlier in the day.
"We have to get together," he said at the end of a four-day tour of the Middle East.
In the interview, Trump said he was optimistic about engaging with Putin, though he is ready to apply pressure on Russia if necessary.
"I think we'll make a deal with Putin...[I] will use leverage on Putin if I have to," he said.
The peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on May 16 ended quickly and with no signs of progress other than a prisoner exchange deal as Ukrainian officials accused Russia of making "unacceptable" demands.
The meeting was over about 90 minutes after it began.
Negotiators agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners on each side in the near future, the heads of both delegations said. That would be the largest single swap since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
But there was no public indication that the wide gaps between Russia and Ukraine on issues such as territory and a cease-fire were narrowed. European leaders joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in condemning Moscow.
"The Russian position is clearly unacceptable, and not for the first time," British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a joint statement with the leaders of Poland, Germany, and France at a summit in Tirana, Albania.
He said that after a meeting with Zelenskyy, who was also at the summit, and a joint phone call with Trump in which they discussed the Istanbul talks, "we are now closely aligning and coordinating our responses and will continue to do so."
"Ukraine is ready to take the fastest possible steps to bring real peace, and it is important that the world holds a strong stance," Zelenskyy said on social media after the call with Trump.
"Our position [is that] if the Russians reject a full and unconditional cease-fire and an end to killings, tough sanctions must follow," he said. "Pressure on Russia must be maintained until Russia is ready to end the war."
Reuters cited an unnamed Ukrainian source as saying the Russian delegation made demands that were "nonstarters" and were "detached from reality and go far beyond anything that was previously discussed."
The Russian delegation, led by presidential adviser Vladimir Medinsky (center), sits across from Ukrainian officials (not pictured) in Istanbul on May 16.
AFP quoted a Ukrainian source as saying one such demand was "for Ukraine to withdraw forces from large parts of Ukrainian territory it controls in order for a cease-fire to begin."
That was a reference to four regions that Russia partially occupies and baselessly claims are Russian -- Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson. Ukraine holds parts of those regions, including the capitals of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson.
Russian remarks about the meeting contrasted sharply with the criticism.
The leader of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, said Moscow was "satisfied with the result" on the whole and is "ready to continue contacts." He said his delegation had "taken note" of what he said was a Ukrainian request for talks between Zelenskyy and Putin.
Medinsky also said the negotiators agreed that "each side will present its vision of a possible future cease-fire and spell it out in detail. After such a vision has been presented, we believe it would be appropriate, as also agreed, to continue our negotiations."
Expectations for a breakthrough had been low at the first direct peace talks since unsuccessful negotiations held in the first two months of Russia's full-scale invasion.
The May 16 talks capped a frenzied week of diplomacy fueled by Trump's push to broker an end to the war, which has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides and a growing number of Ukrainian civilians.
The Russian and Ukrainian negotiators began their meeting sometime after 1 p.m. local time (noon CET) along with officials from host nation Turkey, and it ended before 3 p.m. (14:00CET) Several separate meetings involving US, Ukrainian, Russian, European, and Turkish officials were also held.
Moscow has rejected calls by Ukraine, European nations, and the United States for a full and extendable 30-day cease-fire, saying a truce can only come as the result of negotiations, and Putin spurned Zelenskyy's invitation to hold their first face-to-face meeting since 2019.
SEE ALSO: Putin's Motives, Risks, And Potential Rewards In Rejecting Zelenskyy's Call For TalksTrump Says Meeting With Putin Key To Resolution
"This week we had a real chance to take important steps toward ending this war. If only Putin had not been afraid to come to Turkey," Zelenskyy said in Tirana.
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VIDEO: Zelenskyy Urges Partnership With US As Putin Shuns Istanbul Peace Talks
Opening the talks in Istanbul, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said it is of "critical importance" to implement a cease-fire "as soon as possible" and "also very important that these talks form the basis of a leaders' meeting. We wholeheartedly believe it is possible to reach peace through constructive negotiations."
Ahead of the talks, the leader of the Ukrainian delegation, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, said on Facebook that peace is possible only if "Russia shows its readiness to take specific actions, including a complete cease-fire for at least 30 days and the implementation of humanitarian measures, such as the return of forcibly deported Ukrainian children," and the exchange of all prisoners of war.
Putin's decision to send a lower-level delegation to the talks, which he proposed earlier this week and which Trump urged Ukraine to agree to, had dampened already anemic expectations of substantial progress.
Trump, who was in the region on a Middle East trip, had hinted he might travel to Turkey to take part if Putin attended. "Nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together," Trump said after the Kremlin announced it was sending a lower-level delegation.
After boarding Air Force One in Abu Dhabi on May 16 for the trip back to Washington, Trump said he may call Putin soon. "He and I will meet, and I think we'll solve it or maybe not," he said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, and Ukrainian Head of Presidential Office Andriy Yermak arrive for a meeting at Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul on May 16.
"We're going to get it done. We got to get it done," Trump said of ending the war. "Five thousand young people are being killed every single week on average, and we’re going to get it done."
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on May 15 that there would be no breakthrough unless Trump and Putin sat "across the table" from each other.
"I don't know what the date or the place of that is yet, but that's really the only chance at this point," said Rubio, who met with Ukrainian and Turkish officials at Istanbul's Dolmabahce Palace ahead of the Ukraine-Russia talks at the same venue.
Rubio reiterated "the US position that the killing needs to stop," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said. Michael Anton, head of policy planning at the State Department, was to meet separately with the Russian delegation.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a Trump-Putin meeting to discuss bilateral ties, Ukraine, and other matters is "certainly necessary" but would take time to prepare and should not be held unless it produces results.
Putin launched the full-scale invasion eight years after Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and fomented war in the eastern Donbas region in 2014. Russia now holds about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory but has fallen far short of Putin's goal of subjugating the country, independent since the Soviet collapse in 1991.
The only previous direct peace talks broke up in the spring of 2022 as the sides wrangled over major points of contention and amid revelations of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Bucha, a city they abandoned as they withdrew from northern Ukraine after failing to capture Kyiv.
SEE ALSO: Trump Must Be Globally Involved To 'Make America Great Again,' Says Conservative Pundit Clifford MayIn those negotiations, Russia was seeking a deal that analysts said would have amounted to Kyiv's surrender, leaving Ukraine a permanently neutral country with a small and toothless military, limited sovereignty, and little or no access to Western security support.
Russian officials have suggested Moscow has not scaled back its goals despite its failure to seize Kyiv and its slow progress on the battlefield, where small territorial gains have come at a high price in Russian casualties.
Some experts say that a cease-fire at the current line of hostilities would be a blow to Putin's reputation at home but that the Kremlin could be forced to accept it nonetheless if the West ratchets up economic pressure on Russia, including significantly widening sanctions on its oil shipping fleet.
Zelenskyy: Russia 'Not Serious'
The Kremlin has referred to the May 16 talks as the "resumption" of the 2022 negotiations. Medinsky also led the Russian team at those talks. Zelenskyy described the Russian delegation as "decorative" and said its makeup showed "they are not serious enough about the negotiations."
"The Russians want to draw associations with the year 2022," Zelenskyy's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said on May 16. "But the only thing that connects to those negotiations is the city of Istanbul. And nothing more. All attempts by the Russians to tie today to 2022 will not work."
SEE ALSO: European Leaders, Ukraine Press Russia For A 30-Day Cease-Fire, Starting May 12With Russia rejecting calls for a 30-day cease-fire, the European Union is preparing a new package of sanctions against Moscow, including measures focusing on Russia's financial sector and its lucrative energy exports.
"We will increase the pressure," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Tirana.
Putin has repeatedly said any peace deal must address what Russia calls the "root causes" of the war, a term that evokes the demands Russia made before it launched the full-scale invasion: that Ukraine become a neutral state, dramatically curtail its military, and abandoning its aspirations of joining NATO, among other things.
In addition, Moscow has repeated said Kyiv and the West must accept Russian sovereignty over Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson, the four partially Russian-occupied mainland Ukrainian regions that Putin baselessly declared in September 2022 were part of Russia.
SEE ALSO: Exclusive: Drone Footage Captures The Full Scale of Ukraine’s War Deaths"Putin is not going to end this war, at least not on any reasonable terms. But what he is interested in is building some new relations with the US administration," Kirill Martynov, editor in chief of the Latvia-based Russian language media outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe, told Current Time on May 16.
If negotiations collapse and Europe "fails to achieve some kind of joint action against Putin...then Ukraine will be the main loser -- because, once again, Putin will essentially be able to continue the war," Martynov said. He said Putin's goal is "to keep the war going while avoiding a complete falling out with Trump."
"The reality is that neither Moscow nor Kyiv is ready to agree to a durable peace, as their positions are fundamentally irreconcilable," Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and an expert on Putin's administration, wrote on X.
"This will be a long process. Putin still seems to think he can achieve his maximalist demands," said Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO who was Trump's special representative for Ukraine negotiations during his previous presidential term.