A new round of US-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine is set for Geneva next week

Another round of U.S.-brokered talks between envoys from Russia and Ukraine will take place next week in Geneva, days ahead of the fourth anniversary of the all-out Russian invasion of its neighbor, officials in Moscow and Kyiv said on Friday.

The meeting will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's communications adviser, Dmytro Lytvyn, confirmed the new round of negotiations.

The talks take place against a backdrop of continued fighting along the roughly 1,250-kilometer (750-mile) front line, relentless Russian bombardment of civilian areas of Ukraine and the country's power grid, and Kyiv's almost daily long-range drone attacks on war-related assets on Russian soil.

Previous U.S.-led efforts to find consensus on ending the war, most recently two rounds of talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, have failed to resolve difficult issues, such as the future of Ukraine's Donbas industrial heartland that is largely occupied by Russian forces.

Zelenskyy said last week that the United States has given Ukraine and Russia a June deadline to reach a deal. Previous deadlines given by U.S. President Donald Trump have passed largely without consequence.

Zelenskyy in Munich

He was also due to hold bilateral and multilateral meetings at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of top international security figures.

Russia's bigger army has managed to capture about 20% of Ukraine since hostilities began in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Feb. 24 2022. Its battlefield progress has been slow and costly in terms of troops and armor.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said that ''the Russians are not winning (the war) as some are thinking.''

''This so-called Russian bear is not there,'' he told reporters. ''It is basically still the speed of a garden snail, what we are seeing in Ukraine — this is how the Russians are moving inside Ukraine, very slow, staggering losses.''

Finding compromises is hard

Russian President Vladimir Putin's adviser Vladimir Medinsky, who headed Moscow's team of negotiators in the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul in March 2022, is returning to lead Moscow's delegation.

The previous two rounds of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi reportedly focused on military issues, such as a possible buffer zone and ceasefire monitoring. The return of Medinsky, who has pushed Russian President Vladimir Putin's maximalist conditions for peace, could mark a shift toward political issues in the next round of talks.

Ukraine's delegation will again be led by Rustem Umerov, Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council chief.

It was not clear which American officials would be in Geneva. In the UAE capital, the Trump administration was represented by envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

War of attrition

Overnight from Thursday to Friday, a Russian strike killed three brothers between 8 and 19 years of age in eastern Ukraine, authorities said. Their mother and grandmother survived but sustained multiple injuries, the Donetsk regional prosecutor's office said.

In Odesa, one person was killed and six more injured in a Russian strike at the city's port and energy infrastructure, officials said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday its air defenses shot down 58 Ukrainian drones over several Russian regions and annexed Crimea during the night.

Of those, 43 were brought down in the Volgograd region of southwestern Russia, where three people, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured by drone debris, according to the local governor. Ukraine has recently targeted the Volgograd oil refinery.

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