The News
Negotiators from Ukraine and Russia met Monday in Istanbul for a second round of peace talks, as both sides hammer each other on the battlefield. The meeting was severely delayed, and reportedly ended after barely an hour.
Moscow said it shot down 162 Ukrainian drones overnight, hours after Kyiv carried out an audacious attack in which it claimed to have destroyed 41 Russian planes using drones smuggled across the border.
Kyiv, meanwhile, accused Moscow of firing nearly 500 drones and missiles, with one strike killing 12 Ukrainian soldiers at a training ground.
The upsurge in fighting underscores the challenges of reaching any deal, despite persistent US pressure on both sides to agree a truce: “For now,” Kyiv’s former foreign minister wrote in Foreign Affairs, “a ceasefire in Ukraine is impossible.”