US and Russian diplomats held talks in Istanbul on Thursday about the issues impacting the work of their respective embassies as Washington and Moscow are looking to get diplomatic relations back on track.
According to the Russian news agency TASS, the talks ended after six and a half hours. Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said the 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,” Matvienko said, according to The Associated Press.
The talks in Istanbul followed up a meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18 that involved high-level US and Russian officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. During that meeting, the two sides agreed to normalize relations and work to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the renewed dialogue between the US and Russia “inspires certain hopes.”
“There is reciprocal determination to work toward the restoration of relations between the countries, a gradual solution of the colossal backlog of systemic, strategic problems in the world architecture,” Putin said, according to TASS.
The Russian leader said the current US administration has demonstrated “pragmatism, a realistic view of things, and are abandoning many stereotypes, the so-called rules and messianic ideological cliches of their predecessors, which, essentially, were the reasons that led to the crisis of the entire system of international relations.”
While both Putin and Trump seem eager to reduce tensions, it remains unclear when the war in Ukraine might come to an end. Trump is hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a mineral deal on Friday and has said US military shipments to Ukraine will likely continue until a deal is reached with Russia.
