Expectations of a breakthrough were low as Ukrainian and Russian delegations prepared to meet in Istanbul for the first direct peace talks since unsuccessful negotiations held in the weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The talks on May 15 capped afrenzied weekof diplomacy fueled by US President Donald Trump's push to broker an end to the war, which has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides and a growing number of Ukrainian civilians.

The Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were expected to meet at 12:30 p.m. local time (11:30 CET) along with officials from host nation Turkey. Several separate meetings involving US, Ukrainian, Russian, European, and Turkish officials were also being held.

Moscow has rejected calls by Ukraine, European nations, and the United States for a full and extendable 30-day cease-fire, saying a truce can only come as the result of negotiations, and Russian President Vladimir Putin spurned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's invitation to hold their first face-to-face meeting since 2019.

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Putin's decision to send a lower-level delegation to the talks, which he proposed earlier this week and which Trump urged Ukraine to agree to, dampened already anemic expectations of substantial progress.

Trump, who was in the region on a Middle East trip, had hinted he might travel to Turkey to take part if Putin attended. "Nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together," Trump said after the Kremlin announced it was sending a lower-level delegation.

On May 16, Trump said he was returning to Washington. "Let's see what happens with Russia and Ukraine," he said, adding that he would meet with Putin "as soon as we can set it up."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on May 15 that there would be no breakthrough unless Trump and Putin sat "across the table" from each other.

"I don't know what the date or the place of that is yet, but that's really the only chance at this point," said Rubio, who met with Ukrainian and Turkish officials at Istanbul's Dolmabahce Palace ahead of the Ukraine-Russia talks at the same venue.

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Michael Anton, head of policy planning at the State Department, was to meet separately with the Russian delegation, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said.

Putin launched the full-scale invasion eight years after Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and fomented war in the eastern Donbas region in 2014. Russia now holds about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory but has fallen far short of Putin's goal of subjugating the country, independent since the Soviet collapse in 1991.

The only previous direct peace talks broke up in the spring of 2022 as the sides wrangled over majorpoints of contentionand amid revelations of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Bucha, a city they abandoned as they withdrew from northern Ukraine after failing to capture Kyiv.

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In those negotiations, Russia was seeking a deal that analysts said would have amounted to Kyiv's surrender, leaving Ukraine a permanently neutral country with a small and toothless military, limited sovereignty, and little or no access to Western security support.

Russian officials have suggested Moscow has not scaled back its goals despite its failure to seize Kyiv and its slow progress on the battlefield, where small territorial gains have come at a high price in Russian casualties.

Putin has repeatedly said any peace deal must address what Russia calls the "root causes" of the war, a term that evokes the demands Russia made before it launched the full-scale invasion: that Ukraine become a neutral state, dramatically curtail its military, and abandoning its aspirations of joining NATO, among other things.

In addition, Moscow has repeated said Kyiv and the West must accept Russian sovereignty over four mainland Ukrainian regions that Putin baselessly declared in September 2022 were part of Russia -- Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson -- including large swaths of land that remain in Ukrainian hands.

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The talks "could, in theory, lead to something -- but don't count on it," Britain-based Russia analyst Sam Greene wrote in a commentary posted on Substack this week. "By my reading, there isn't sufficient overlap in the parties' interests to allow for progress."

"The reality is that neither Moscow nor Kyiv is ready to agree to a durable peace, as their positions are fundamentally irreconcilable," Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and an expert on Putin's administration,wrote on X.

"This will be a long process. Putin still seems to think he can achieve his maximalist demands," said Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to NATO who was Trump's special representative for Ukraine negotiations during his previous term and is now a distinguished fellow at the IUS-based Center for European Policy Analysis.