ISTANBUL: US President Donald Trump is “open” to meeting his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in Turkiye, the White House said, after the two sides failed on Monday to make headway toward an elusive ceasefire.
Delegations from both sides did, however, agree another large-scale prisoner exchange in their meeting in Istanbul, which in mid-May also hosted their first round of face-to-face talks.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump come together for a third round later this month in either Istanbul or Ankara.
Putin has so far refused such a meeting. But Zelensky has said he is willing, underlining that key issues can only be resolved at leaders-level.
Trump, who wants a swift end to the three-year war, is “open” to a three-way summit “if it comes to that, but he wants both of these leaders and both sides to come to the table together,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in Washington.
But despite Trump’s willingness to meet with Putin and Zelensky, no US representative took part in Monday’s talks in Istanbul, according to a State Department spokesperson.
Zelensky said that, “We are very much awaiting strong steps from the United States” and urged Trump to toughen sanctions on Russia to “push” it to agree to a full ceasefire.
In Monday’s meeting, Ukraine said that Moscow had rejected its call for an unconditional ceasefire. It offered instead a partial truce of two to three days in some areas of the frontline.
Russia will only agree a full ceasefire if Ukrainian troops pull back entirely from four regions — Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — according to its negotiating terms reported on by Russian state media. Russia currently only partly controls those regions.
Moscow has also demanded a ban on Kyiv joining NATO, limiting Ukraine’s military and ending Western military support.
Top negotiators from both sides agreed to swap all severely wounded soldiers and captured fighters under the age of 25.
Russia’s lead negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said it would involve “at least 1,000” on each side.
The two sides also agreed to hand over the bodies of 6,000 soldiers, Ukraine said after the talks.
“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.
Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.
“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” Medinsky said, adding that this was needed to collect the bodies of dead soldiers from the battlefield.
Zelensky hit back on social media: “I think ‘idiots’, because the whole point of a ceasefire is to stop people from becoming dead in the first place.”
Kyiv said it would study a document the Russian side handed its negotiators outlining its demands for both peace and a full ceasefire.
Zelensky said after the Istanbul talks concluded that any deal for lasting peace must not “reward” Putin, and has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to cover combat on air, sea and land.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who led his country’s delegation, called for a next meeting to take place before the end of June. He also said a Putin-Zelensky summit should be discussed.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said after the talks — inside a luxury hotel on the banks of the Bosphorus — that they were held “in a constructive atmosphere.”
“During the meeting, the parties decided to continue preparations for a possible meeting at the leader level,” Fidan said on social media.
Tens of thousands have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine destroyed and millions forced to flee their homes in Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.
In the front-line town of Dobropillya in eastern Ukraine, 53-year-old Volodymyr told AFP he had no hope left for an end to the conflict.
“We thought that everything would stop. And now there is nothing to wait for. We have no home, nothing. We were almost killed by drones,” he said.
After months of setbacks for Kyiv’s military, Ukraine said it had carried out an audacious attack on Sunday, smuggling drones into Russia and then firing them at air bases, damaging around 40 strategic Russian bombers worth $7 billion in a major special operation.
Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire
https://arab.news/4pt84
Trump ‘open’ to meeting Ukraine, Russia leaders to push ceasefire
- Russia will only agree a full ceasefire if Ukrainian troops pull back entirely from four regions — Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
