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Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, and Russian envoy Vladimir Medinsky will be in Istanbul on Friday, according to Turkish Foreign Ministry sources.
The ministry noted that the delegations, initially expected to meet Thursday (May 15) for peace talks on Ukraine, will remain in Istanbul on Friday (May 16). It remains unclear in which format the talks will be held.
Meanwhile, “The meeting between Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and the Russian side, headed by Vladimir Medinsky, has started,” a source said of discussions ended at Istanbul’s Dolmabahce Palace.
Meanwhile, according to Foreign Ministry sources, a series of talks in different formats is expected on Friday. Trilateral meetings involving the United States, Ukraine and Türkiye, as well as Russia, Ukraine and Türkiye, are on the table.
However, the sources said it remains unclear whether a quadrilateral meeting involving the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and Türkiye will also take place.
Russia and Ukraine were expected to meet Thursday at the palace on the Bosphorus for their first direct peace negotiations in more than three years. But as the day progressed with no confirmation of timing, it remained unclear whether the talks would be held later Thursday or postponed until Friday.
Rubio, who was in the southern Turkish city of Antalya for a NATO summit on Thursday, was due to arrive in Istanbul on Friday. He told reporters he would meet Ukraine’s top diplomat, Andriy Sybiha, there, while a lower-level U.S. official would meet with the Russian delegation. Sybiha is not officially part of the Ukrainian delegation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was in Ankara earlier Thursday, has dispatched a streamlined team to Istanbul, after Russia arrived with a relatively low-level delegation.
Ukraine is represented by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, while Russia’s delegation is led by Vladimir Medinsky, a hawkish advisor to President Vladimir Putin. Medinsky previously led failed talks in 2022 and has questioned Ukraine’s right to exist.
The meeting in Istanbul follows Putin’s call for direct talks during a Sunday press conference in Moscow. The Russian president rejected a 30-day cease-fire initiative backed by Ukraine and its Western allies — a proposal Kyiv said Russia has “completely ignored.”
Earlier efforts to broker a settlement in Istanbul — including a failed round of negotiations in April 2022, just two months after the full-scale invasion — are widely seen as a missed opportunity.
The Istanbul meeting would mark the highest-level in-person engagement between Russian and Ukrainian officials in more than a year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. Russian forces currently occupy about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
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