Istanbul: Russian and US diplomats met in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss normalising the operation of their respective embassies after years expelling each others’ diplomats.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the talks followed an understanding reached during President Donald Trump’s call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and contact between senior Russian and U.S. diplomats and other officials in Saudi Arabia.
Speaking during Thursday’s meeting of the Federal Security Service, Putin hailed the Trump administration’s “pragmatism and realistic view” compared with what he described as the “stereotypes and messianic ideological cliches” of its predecessors.
“The first contacts with the new US administration encourage certain hopes,” Putin said. “There is a mutual readiness to work to restore relations and gradually solve a colossal amount of systemic strategic problems in the global architecture.”
Putin said that “part of Western elites are still determined to maintain global instability” and could try to “disrupt or compromise the dialogue that has begun,” adding that Russian diplomats and security agencies should focus their efforts on thwarting such attempts.
In Riyadh, Moscow and Washington agreed to start working toward ending the war in Ukraine and improving their diplomatic and economic ties. That includes restoring staffing at embassies, which in recent years were hit hard by mutual expulsions of large numbers of diplomats, closures of offices, and other restrictions.
A US Embassy official in Ankara confirmed that the Istanbul talks focused on the issues affecting the operation of respective diplomatic missions.
Later Thursday, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department said: “The United States raised concerns regarding access to banking and contracted services as well as the need to ensure stable and sustainable staffing levels at the US Embassy in Moscow. Through constructive discussions, both sides identified concrete initial steps to stabilize bilateral mission operations in these areas.”
Moscow had no immediate comments after the negotiations, which Russian news agencies said lasted for over six hours.
Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the Russian parliament’s upper house, said during a visit to Turkey on Thursday that U.S.-Russia talks should help restore the “full-fledged work of our diplomatic missions.”
“I’m sure that the agreements will be reached and we will return to civilized communication, which was disrupted by the previous administration,” she said in Ankara, according to Russian news agencies.
Ties between Moscow and Washington plummeted to their lowest levels since the Cold War after Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2022.
No Ukrainian officials were present at last week’s talks. The Kremlin insisted that the meeting was about restoring relations and dialogue with the United States, something it said would pave the way for eventual peace talks.
Speaking during a visit to Qatar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the talks in Istanbul would seek to resolve “systemic problems that have accumulated as a result of the unlawful activities of the previous (US) administration to create artificial obstacles for the work of the Russian embassy to which we, naturally, reciprocated and also created uncomfortable conditions for the work of the American embassy in Moscow.”
Lavrov added that based on the outcome of the meeting, “it will be clear how quickly and effectively we can move forward.”
