Russia has decided to significantly cut its military activities around Kyiv and Chernihiv, announced one of its deputy defense ministers after meeting with the Ukrainian delegation in Turkey.
"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," Alexander Fomin, the deputy minister, told reporters.
Russia's General Staff will reveal in more detail the decisions that have been made after the delegation has returned to Moscow, Fomin added.
Heads of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations arrive in Istanbul, Turkey, for the latest round of peace talks, March 29, 2022. /AP
The Ukrainian delegation, led by David Arakhamia, said they had proposed at the talks that Ukraine would adopt neutral status in
exchange for security guarantees, which means Kyiv would not join military alliances or host military bases.
The talk this time could enable a possible meeting between the presidents of the two countries, said the Ukrainian top negotiator as he called the Turkey talks "sufficient for a meeting at the leaders' level."
The face-to-face meeting - held in Istanbul, capital of Turkey - came after three rounds of face-to-face peace talks and a series of online discussions. No major agreement had resulted from the previous talks.
Over a month into the 'military operation'
With more than a month into what Kremlin called a "special military operation," over 3.8 million people have fled abroad, thousands have been killed and injured, and Russia's economy has been pummeled by sanctions.
A missile struck an oil depot in western Ukraine late Monday, the second attack on oil facilities in a region that has been spared the worst of the fighting. On Tuesday morning, an explosion blasted a hole in a nine-story administration building in Mykolaiv, a southern port city that Russia has unsuccessfully tried to capture.
Seven people died in the missile attack and 22 were wounded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an address to Danish lawmakers on Tuesday.
Russian forces have attacked Ukraine's southern ports including Kherson, Odesa, Mykolaiv and Mariupol, wher in the southern port city of Mariupol, nearly 5,000 people have been killed, according to the mayor's office.
Elsewher, however, Ukrainian forces have made advances in recent days, recapturing territory from Russian troops on the outskirts of Kyiv, in the northeast, and in the south, although UK military intelligence suggested that Russia still poses significant threat to the capital.
"However the center of the city remains under Ukrainian control," said the UK Ministry of Defense.
The sides have held talks via video link in recent weeks and both have publicly discussed a formula under which Ukraine might accept some kind of neutral status.
But neither side has budged over Russia's territorial demands, including Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed in 2014, and eastern territories known as the Donbas.
