Russia has claimed to have seized two more settlements in its attempted drive through eastern Ukraine as direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow appeared set to get under way in Turkey.
A Russian Defence Ministry statement said Moscow’s forces had seized Novooleksandrivka, a village near Pokrovsk, a logistics hub that Moscow has targeted for months without capturing it.
The ministry said its forces had also taken Torske, further northeast and near two other cities Moscow would like to capture in the longer term - Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Kyiv has not acknowledgement the claimed captures and its top commander said battles raged over 1,100km of the front line.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s military listed Novooleksandrivka as one of more than dozen settlements which it said had come under Russian attack.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Kyiv wanted a “just peace”, but continued to face “active combat continuing on a stretch of the front extending about 1,100 km (680 miles)”.
Describing on Telegram his presentation to a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council, Syrskyi said Russia “has turned its aggression against Ukraine into a war of attrition and is using a combined force of up to 640,000 troops.”
Friday’s talks will be the first direct discussions between the sides since March 2022, but hopes of a breakthrough were limited as Russian leader Vladimir Putin ignored a call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet.
US President Donald Trump on Thursday said there would be no progress towards peace without a meeting between himself and Putin.
Mr Zelensky, speaking to reporters in Ankara where he flew on Thursday after challenging Putin to sit down with him, accused Moscow of not taking efforts to end the war seriously by sending a low-level negotiating team that he described as “a theatre prop”.
His proposal to Putin came after a flurry of manoeuvring last weekend as each side sought a diplomatic advantage.
The head of the Russian delegation, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, said in Istanbul the representatives were ready to meet Ukrainian officials.
“The task of these direct negotiations with Ukraine is to establish long-term peace sooner or later by eliminating the root causes of this conflict,” he said in a brief statement.
It was not clear when they would meet.
Mr Medinsky said late on Thursday that the Russian delegation would be waiting for Ukrainian officials at 10am on Friday.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio said he would confer on Friday in Istanbul with Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan and the Ukrainian delegation, adding that the Russian delegation would be meeting with other members of the US team and that he hoped all sides could get together.
“We don’t have high expectations of what will happen tomorrow. And frankly, at this point, I think it’s abundantly clear that the only way we’re going to have a breakthrough here is between President Trump and President Putin,” Mr Rubio told reporters in Antalya, Turkey, where he was attending a Nato foreign ministers meeting.
Mr Zelensky, who is heading on Friday to a gathering of European officials in Albania, said he had decided to send the delegation to Istanbul to demonstrate to Trump that Ukraine wants to end the fighting.
He said the Ukrainian side would be headed by defence minister Rustem Umerov and its aim is “to attempt at least the first steps toward de-escalation, the first steps toward ending the war - namely, a ceasefire”.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier welcomed Mr Zelensky with an honour guard at the presidential palace in Ankara before the two held talks.
The war has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides and more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the UN, and continues along the roughly 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) front line.
Russian forces are preparing a fresh military offensive, Ukrainian government and Western military analysts say.
At least five civilians were killed and 29 injured in the past day, according to authorities in five eastern regions of Ukraine where Russia’s army is trying to advance.
The diplomatic manoeuvring began on Saturday when European leaders met Mr Zelensky in Kyiv and urged the Kremlin to agree to a full, unconditional 30-day ceasefire as a first step towards peace.
Mr Putin responded early on Sunday by proposing direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul.
Then came Mr Zelensky’s challenge to Putin for face-to-face talks.
After days of silence, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov finally said on Thursday that Putin had no plans to travel to Istanbul in the next few days.
Trump said he was not surprised that Putin was a no-show.
The US president had pressed for Putin and Mr Zelensky to meet but brushed off Putin’s apparent decision not to attend.
“I didn’t think it was possible for Putin to go if I’m not there,” Trump told reporters at a meeting with business executives in Doha, Qatar, on the third day of his visit to the Middle East.
Trump said a meeting between him and Mr Putin was crucial to break the deadlock.
“I don’t believe anything’s going to happen whether you like it or not, until (Putin) and I get together,” he said on Air Force One while travelling from Doha to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
“But we’re going to have to get it solved because too many people are dying.”
