Russia and Ukraine have agreed a large-scale exchange of prisoners of war, Russian chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said on Wednesday, as two days of US-backed talks in Abu Dhabi came to a close.
Medinsky, speaking on Russian state television after the talks ended, said the details of the swap would be made public soon. It would be the latest in a long series of prisoner exchanges between the two sides since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than four and a half years ago.
The Abu Dhabi meeting was the first three-way talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States since February. Medinsky said the two sides had reached a common understanding on some issues but not on others, and that the discussion would continue. A new European security framework was a central theme of the talks, he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had described the first day of talks as ‘constructive and quite substantive’, while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the opening day very productive. But there was no sign of a breakthrough on the bigger questions: Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown no sign of dropping his demand that Ukraine surrender the entire eastern Donbas region before a peace deal can be struck, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would not agree to an immediate ceasefire without knowing what would happen next.
Source: Reuters
