Expectations of a breakthrough were low as Ukrainian and Russian delegations met in Istanbul for the first direct peace talks since unsuccessful negotiations held in the weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The talks on May 16 capped afrenzied weekof diplomacy fueled by US President Donald Trump's push to broker an end to the war, which has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides and a growing number of Ukrainian civilians.

The Russian and Ukrainian negotiators began their meeting sometime after 1 p.m. local time (12:00 CET) along with officials from host nation Turkey. Several separate meetings involving US, Ukrainian, Russian, European, and Turkish officials were also being held.

Moscow has rejected calls by Ukraine, European nations, and the United States for a full and extendable 30-day cease-fire, saying a truce can only come as the result of negotiations, and Russian President Vladimir Putin spurned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's invitation to hold their first face-to-face meeting since 2019.

Ahead of the talks, the leader of the Ukrainian delegation, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov,said on Facebookthat peace is possible only if "Russia shows its readiness to take specific actions, including a complete cease-fire for at least 30 days and the implementation of humanitarian measures, such as the return of forcibly deported Ukrainian children," and the exchange of all prisoners of war.

Putin's decision to send a lower-level delegation to the talks, which he proposed earlier this week and which Trump urged Ukraine to agree to, dampened already anemic expectations of substantial progress.

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Trump, who was in the region on a Middle East trip, had hinted he might travel to Turkey to take part if Putin attended. "Nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together," Trump said after the Kremlin announced it was sending a lower-level delegation.

On May 16, Trump said he was returning to Washington. "Let's see what happens with Russia and Ukraine," he said, adding that he would meet with Putin "as soon as we can set it up."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on May 15 that there would be no breakthrough unless Trump and Putin sat "across the table" from each other.

"I don't know what the date or the place of that is yet, but that's really the only chance at this point," said Rubio, who met with Ukrainian and Turkish officials at Istanbul's Dolmabahce Palace ahead of the Ukraine-Russia talks at the same venue.

The delegations from the United States (left), Turkey (center), and Ukraine (right) gather for a meeting at Dolmabahce Palace on May 16.

Rubio met with his Ukrainian and Turkish counterparts on May 16 and reiterated "the US position that the killing needs to stop," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said. Michael Anton, head of policy planning at the State Department, was to meet separately with the Russian delegation.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a Trump-Putin meeting to discuss bilateral ties, Ukraine, and other matters is "certainly necessary" but would take time to prepare and should not be held unless it produces results.

Putin launched the full-scale invasion eight years after Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and fomented war in the eastern Donbas region in 2014. Russia now holds about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory but has fallen far short of Putin's goal of subjugating the country, independent since the Soviet collapse in 1991.

The only previous direct peace talks broke up in the spring of 2022 as the sides wrangled over majorpoints of contentionand amid revelations of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Bucha, a city they abandoned as they withdrew from northern Ukraine after failing to capture Kyiv.

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In those negotiations, Russia was seeking a deal that analysts said would have amounted to Kyiv's surrender, leaving Ukraine a permanently neutral country with a small and toothless military, limited sovereignty, and little or no access to Western security support.

Russian officials have suggested Moscow has not scaled back its goals despite its failure to seize Kyiv and its slow progress on the battlefield, where small territorial gains have come at a high price in Russian casualties.

The Kremlin has referred to the May 16 talks as the "resumption" of the 2022 negotiations, and head of the Russian delegation is Vladimir Medinsky, a Putin aide and former Culture Minister who also led the Russian team in 2022. Zelenskyy described the Russian delegation as "decorative" and said its makeup showed "they are not serious enough about the negotiations."

"I think Putin made a mistake by sending a low level delegation with this historian leading the delegation, who was also there in the talks in 2022," NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on May 16 ahead of a European defense and security summit in Tirana, Albania, with Russia's war against Ukraine high on the agenda.

"The ball is clearly in his part of the field now, in his court. He has to play ball. He has to be serious about wanting peace. So I think all the pressure is now on Putin," Rutte added.

European Union foreign chief Kaja Kallas said Putin was "playing games, which shows that they are not serious about peace."

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With Russia rejecting calls for a 30-day cease-fire, the European Union is preparing a new package of sanctions against Moscow, including measures focusing on Russia's financial sector and its lucrative energy exports.

"We will increase the pressure," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Tirana.

Putin has repeatedly said any peace deal must address what Russia calls the "root causes" of the war, a term that evokes the demands Russia made before it launched the full-scale invasion: that Ukraine become a neutral state, dramatically curtail its military, and abandoning its aspirations of joining NATO, among other things.

In addition, Moscow has repeated said Kyiv and the West must accept Russian sovereignty over four mainland Ukrainian regions that Putin baselessly declared in September 2022 were part of Russia -- Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson -- including large swaths of land that remain in Ukrainian hands.

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"Putin is not going to end this war, at least not on any reasonable terms. But what he is interested in is building some new relations with the US administration," Kirill Martynov, editor in chief of the Latvia-based Russian language media outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe, told Current Time on May 16.

If negotiations collapse and Europe "fails to achieve some kind of joint action against Putin...then Ukraine will be the main loser -- because, once again, Putin will essentially be able to continue the war," Martynov said. He said Putin's goal is "to keep the war going while avoiding a complete falling out with Trump."

The Istanbul talks "could, in theory, lead to something -- but don't count on it," Britain-based Russia analyst Sam Greene wrote in a commentary posted on Substack this week. "By my reading, there isn't sufficient overlap in the parties' interests to allow for progress."

"The reality is that neither Moscow nor Kyiv is ready to agree to a durable peace, as their positions are fundamentally irreconcilable," Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and an expert on Putin's administration,wrote on X.

"This will be a long process. Putin still seems to think he can achieve his maximalist demands," said Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO who was Trump's special representative for Ukraine negotiations during his previous term and is now a distinguished fellow at the US-based Center for European Policy Analysis.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, Current Time, AFP, and Reuters