Russia and Ukraine appeared to make progress in their first face-to-face talks in more than two weeks, with Moscow saying it was scaling down its military operations around Kyiv and northern Ukraine, while Ukraine said it would accept being neutral.
Delegations from the two sides held talks in Istanbul on March 29 as Russia, more than a month into its unprovoked invasion, continued to encounter stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces, which made gains in some areas by retaking ground on the outskirts of the capital region.
“In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing (an) agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions,” Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin told reporters in Moscow.
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For its part, Ukraine proposed not to join military alliances or host foreign troops as long as it had outside security guarantees and as long as Russia did not stand in the way of the country joining the European Union.
“Security guarantees treaty with an enhanced analogue of Article 5 of NATO. Guarantor states (USA, UK, Turkey, France, Germany etc.) legally actively involved in protecting Ukraine from any aggression,” Mykhaylo Podolyak wrote in a post on Twitter, adding that the question of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, would be settled through political and diplomatic means, not militarily.
The fate of the eastern regions where Russia-backed separatists have battled Ukrainian forces since 2014 would be set aside to be discussed by the Ukrainian and Russian leaders, with any peace deal requiring a referendum in Ukraine, Podolyak said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded to the developments by saying he doubted Russia’s seriousness.
“There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does. We’re focused on the latter,” he said, speaking at a press conference in Morocco. “What Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine and its people, and that continues as we speak.”
The costs of the biggest attack on a European nation since World War Two continue to mount, with more than 3.9 million people fleeing Ukraine and millions more internally displaced.
Thousands have been killed and injured, including civilians who have failed to find places to hide as Russia appears to target nonmilitary installations, such as apartment buildings, hospitals, and shopping malls.
Meanwhile, Russia’s economy has been pummeled by Western sanctions and Ukraine, long considered Europe’s breadbasket, has seen its tractors used as much for towing Russian tanks and other armored vehicles as they have for sowing fields.
The appearance of what Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, the host of the talks, called “meaningful progress,” comes as tens of thousands of civilians in the southern port city of Mariupol continue to be trapped under repeated shelling and air strikes by Russian forces.
Mariupol has been one of the main focal points of fighting since the start of the invasion more than a month ago. The situation in the city, which numbered some 400,000 people before the war, has been described as “apocalyptic.”
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Russia has agreed to open three humanitarian corridors, including one from Mariupol, to allow civilians to escape battle zones but it was unclear how many of the tens of thousands trapped in the city would be able to make it out.
In an address to the Danish parliament on March 29, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Russia’s assault on the besieged city “a crime against humanity that is happening in front of the eyes of the whole planet in real time.”
Russia’s pledge to scale back some of its operations comes with its overwhelming advantage in firepower failing to seize any major Ukrainian city.
British military intelligence said earlier on March 29 that Russian forces continue to pose a significant threat to Kyiv through their strike capability even though Ukrainians keep launching localized counterattacks to the northwest of the Ukrainian capital.
The fierce resistance put up by Ukraine took Russia by surprise, according to NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana, as has the cohesiveness of the West’s response.
NATO, he said, is “more united than ever and willing and ready to support Ukraine in its just fight for freedom and sovereignty, but also making sure that all allies, especially ones on the eastern flank that are more exposed, are fully protected by nature.”
“I would say that after one month, Mr. Putin is far from the objectives of his initial campaign,” Geoana told Current Time in an interview.
“We hope that in the end, Mr. Putin realizes in a cost benefit analysis that he should limit the losses that he already has, not only militarily, but also economically, reputationally and in terms of the global interests of Russia. So we hope that this will soon come through a political solution, sooner rather than later. But probably we’ll see more of these very difficult times for the people of Ukraine,” he added.
In the northern city of Chernihiv, another area Russia said it would ease up on, Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko said at least 350 civilians had been killed by Russian attacks, and probably many more as officials continue to comb through the rubble each day searching for survivors.
“Russia’s goal is the destruction of the civilian population. This is the genocide of the Ukrainian people. It’s absolutely being done on purpose,” he told RFE/RL.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its latest update on March 29 that Russian forces keep launching missile strikes on residential neighborhoods across the country, focusing on targeting fuel storage compartments in an effort to “complicate logistics” and “create conditions for a humanitarian crisis.”
Fuel depots have been reportedly hit over the past days in several cities such as Kyiv, Lviv, Rivne, Zhytomyr and Lutsk.
Ukrainian officials also said that Russian forces had carried out a missile strike on the town of Lyubotyn in the northeast Kharkiv region the previous day, flattening several houses and wounding several people.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, said on March 29 that Moscow and Washington would need to eventually have a dialogue on security, but that their relations would inevitably be affected by “personal insults” U.S. President Joe Biden has directed at his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
