The conversations in Istanbul between the main diplomat in Turkey and a Russian delegation have ended with the two parties that met again with the Ukrainians, said a source of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The meeting between Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, and the delegation headed by Vladimir Medinsky at the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul ended late on Thursday, added the source.
“The meeting is over. Tomorrow there will be more talks in different formats,” he said, indicating that “the trilateral conversations between Russia, Ukraine and Türkiye are on the agenda.”
There would also be a round of American, Ukrainian and Turkish conversations.
“It has not ended if there will be a quadrilateral format,” added Grouping officials of the four countries.
Russia and Ukraine were expected to meet Thorsday in Istanbul for their first direct peace conversations in more than three years.
But as the day spent without any concrete indication of the times, it was not clear when the parties would meet, with the Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, suggesting that meetings would occur on Friday.
Speaking to journalists outside a NATO summit in the coastal city of southern Antalya, Rubio said he would meet with the main diplomat of Ukraine, Andrii Sybiha, in Istanbul on Friday.
And he said that an American level official would meet with the Russian delegation.
“I want to be honest … we have no high expectations of what will happen tomorrow,” Rubio told journalists, saying that he hoped Türkiye would work to unite the two delegations.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had flown to Turkey hoping to meet a high -level Russian delegation in Istanbul, instead of staying in Ankara, where Hey Hero speaks with Türkiye Tayyip Erdogan.
With Russia appearing with a relatively low level team, Zensky decided to send to its Minister of Defense, Rustem Uumerov, to lead the Ukrainian delegation.
Medinsky, who runs the Russian team, is an aggressive advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has questioned the right of Ukraine to exist and led conversations failed in 2022 at the beginning of the war.
