Russia wants “victory” over Ukraine not a “compromise peace,” according to a Vladimir Putin ally, hitting hopes of the war ending soon.
Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said holding peace talks with Ukraine was not for the Kremlin and Kyiv to both make concessions to stop the bloodshed.
“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,” said former Russian president Mr Medvedev, now hawkish deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.
“That’s what the Russian Memorandum published yesterday is about.”
Mr 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.
At the talks, which lasted just 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.
To try to justify his invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, Putin has alleged the country is run by “neo-Nazis”, a claim which flies in the face of reality.
Donald Trump has been seeking to push Russia and Ukraine towards a ceasefire and peace deal, often appearing to side with Putin in the process.
But Britain has long been warning that it does not believe that Putin wants peace, as his army continues to grind forward, seizing more territory, while suffering heavy losses.
The US president has from time to time vented his anger at Putin, telling him to stop attacking Ukrainian cities, but has so far stopped short of imposing threatened extra sanctions to hit Russia as part of efforts to force the Kremlin to the negotiating table.
However, it is not clear if America will continue to provide military supplies to Ukraine long-term, if Putin continues to rebuff peace moves.
Before the peace talks in Istanbul on Monday, Kyiv launched a highly successful and audacious attack from within Russia on its strategic bomber bases, and Russia unleashed its largest drone attack of the war against Ukraine.
Kyiv officials said the surprise drone attack on Sunday damaged or destroyed more than 40 warplanes at air bases deep inside Russia, including the remote Arctic, Siberian and Far East regions more than 4,300 miles from Ukraine.
The complex and unprecedented raid, which struck simultaneously in three time zones, took over a year and a half to prepare and was “a major slap in the face for Russia’s military power”, said Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Ukrainian security service, who led its planning.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called it a “brilliant operation” that would go down in history.
The attacks destroyed or heavily damaged nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia on Sunday fired the biggest number of drones, 472, at Ukraine in an apparent effort to overwhelm air defences, say military sources.
Mr Medvedev stressed, in an apparent response to Ukraine’s weekend strikes on Russian strategic bomber bases, that Moscow would take revenge.
“Retribution is inevitable,” he said.
More Russian drone strikes were launched overnight into Tuesday on northern Ukraine.
