Rubio says Ukraine peace talks need Trump and Putin for a breakthrough

Top official from the U.S., Marco Rubio, said he does not expect much from the Ukrainian peace talks, as he thinks progress requires the presidents of both countries to meet.

A breakthrough, Rubio thinks, cannot happen at these talks until Trump and Putin talk directly. Ukraine sent a delegation to the talks in Istanbul, while Moscow sent one headed by a presidential aide, something Ukraine’s president found unsatisfactory, saying it was a low-level team. He claimed that the Kremlin's team attending the talks had the needed expertise.

Trump, who was travelling in the Middle East, said earlier that meaningful progress in talks would be hard until he met with President Putin.

Asked by the BBC on board Air Force One if he was disappointed by the level of the Russian delegation, he said: "Look, nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together".

"He wasn't going if I wasn't there and I don't believe anything's going to happen, whether you like it or not, until he and I get together," he added. "But we're going to have to get it solved because too many people are dying."

Delegations from Turkey, the US, Ukraine and Russia were expected to meet in Istanbul on Thursday for the first time since talks last year, but no official time had been set by Thursday evening, and some news reports say the meeting might happen on Friday. As of Thursday evening, no specific time for these talks to happen had been chosen yet. As of Friday morning, no talks had taken place, but some media outlets were suggesting they could happen sometime that day.

Medinsky also told reporters in Istanbul that Russia viewed the talks as a continuation of negotiations from last year that happened soon after Russia attacked Ukraine. "The task of direct negotiations with the Ukrainian side is to sooner or later reach the establishment of long-term peace by eliminating the basic root causes of the conflict," Medinsky said.