While there was no apparent breakthrough in the most recent round of discussions, meetings were set to carry on into a second day, Kyiv said.
The US-mediated talks are the latest in a flurry of diplomacy that has so far failed to strike a deal to halt the war, unleashed by Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
Underscoring the human toll from the conflict, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday that 55,000 of his country’s troops had been killed, a rare assessment of battlefield losses that both Moscow and Kyiv have not typically provided.
“And there are a great number Ukraine lists as missing,” he told French TV network France 2, which translated his comments.
The war has spiralled into Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, with hundreds of thousands killed, millions forced to flee their homes in Ukraine and much of the eastern and southern part of the country decimated.
Wednesday’s talks came following weeks of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure, which have left Kyiv residents in darkness and cold, with temperatures dropping as low as -20C.
Despite the Kremlin repeating its hardline demands ahead of the talks, Ukraine’s top negotiator Rustem Umerov said the first day had been “substantive and productive, focused on concrete steps and practical solutions”.
Zelenskyy said on Wednesday he expected a new prisoner exchange with Russia “in the near future”.
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