On the Edge of Negotiation: A Visit to Turkey, the Human Calculus of Prisoner Swaps, and the Growing Cold of War
There is a kind of exhausted hope that accompanies any announcement of peace talks in this war—a brittle, tentative thing that flares up in living rooms and hospital wards and fades when shells fall. When President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would travel to Turkey “tomorrow” to try to reinvigorate negotiations and restore prisoner-of-war exchanges, the words landed like a bell in rooms both near and far: an invitation to believe and a reminder of how easily belief can be broken.
Imagine Istanbul’s Bosphorus breeze carrying the smell of roasted chestnuts and the distant murmur of traffic—this is the city that hosted earlier direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations earlier this year, talks that produced few concrete breakthroughs beyond the deeply human work of releasing prisoners and returning bodies. The memory of those corridors of diplomacy now collides with the front lines: a teenager killed in Kharkiv, power stations damaged in Donetsk, and people waking up to fewer lights and more fear.
A mission with familiar echoes
“We are preparing to reinvigorate negotiations, and we have developed solutions that we will propose to our partners,” Mr. Zelensky posted on social media, with a tone that mixed urgency and weary determination. He added the mission was also about “restoring POW exchanges and bringing our prisoners of war home”—a phrase that sounds simple and is anything but.
Prisoner swaps, more than ceasefires or troop movements, have been where this conflict’s fragile humanity has been visible. Between May and July, the Istanbul talks produced primarily swaps and repatriations of the fallen. The last documented exchange took place in early October, when Russia and Ukraine each handed over 185 prisoners. Behind that number are families who wait, seasons of birthdays missed, and the slow, bureaucratic work of identifying bodies.
“Those exchanges are not a diplomatic side-show,” said a Kyiv negotiator who asked not to be named. “They are lifelines. They are the only points our people can hang onto as being clearly human in a situation that otherwise treats everyone as strategic chess pieces.”
The battlefield—that daily counterpoint
No talk of diplomacy is complete without its counterpoint: the explosions, the bodies, the flickering lights in winter. In the Kharkiv region this month, a 17-year-old girl wounded in a missile strike on Berestyn died in hospital, Kharkiv governor Oleg Synegubov said on Telegram. He added that the attack wounded at least nine others, including a 16-year-old boy, and that emergency crews were on the scene.
Elsewhere, drone strikes have ignited fires in Dnipro and battered residential areas and public services. Just yesterday, aerial strikes killed five people and destroyed a kindergarten in eastern Ukraine. Frontline towns like Balakliya have seen residential neighborhoods shattered. And in the Russian-controlled parts of Donetsk, local officials reported that Ukrainian drone strikes had damaged thermal power stations, leaving hundreds of thousands without electricity.
“We wake up to the sound of drones and the sound of generators,” said Hanna, a schoolteacher in Kharkiv who delivered classes over a patched-together internet connection. “My students ask if the lights will work for their evening homework. How do you answer a child that question and make them feel safe?”
Winter, infrastructure and a strategy of attrition
There is a deliberate logic to targeting energy and water infrastructure as temperatures drop. Cold weather attributes urgency to repair, impacts civilian life directly, and chips away at morale and logistics. Ukraine has responded by stepping up long-range strikes against Russian-controlled infrastructure, a tit-for-tat campaign meant to erode Moscow’s ability to sustain front-line operations.
Russia’s Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Moscow is “open to negotiation processes” to resolve the war, blaming Kyiv and Europe for what he called a freeze in talks. Kyiv, on the other hand, argues that Russian demands—pressuring Kyiv to cede territory—are tantamount to capitulation and therefore unacceptable.
“For a negotiation to be real,” a retired diplomat in Ankara told me over strong Turkish tea, “both sides must come with parameters that allow for political compromise. You cannot begin from maximalist positions and call it talks.”
Why Turkey? Why now?
Turkey has carved a role for itself as an intermediary in this conflict—balancing Ankara’s own strategic relations with Moscow and Kyiv while presenting itself as a venue where talks can feel neutral. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has hosted delegations before; his government’s ability to convene parties who otherwise refuse to sit together has become a quiet foreign policy asset.
For Zelensky, the trip is also a stage in a larger European tour aimed at shoring up military supplies and international backing for Ukraine’s battered energy grid and its armed forces, which have been depleted after months of intense fighting. He was due to meet Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and had earlier signed an accord with France that, according to Kyiv, would allow Ukraine access to up to 100 fighter jets and other hardware, including drones—a deal that signals how Western military support is evolving.
What’s at stake—and what the public rarely sees
Beyond diplomats and soldiers there are the everyday stakes: children who go to school in shifts because classrooms are damaged; farmers who cannot sow or harvest because of restricted access to fields; hospitals running on generators. Millions of people have been displaced since the full-scale invasion began in 2022; UN agencies have estimated that millions more are living with the daily insecurity of disrupted services and energy shortages.
Prisoner exchanges, then, take on added weight. They are the human punctuation points in a war otherwise written in artillery and spreadsheets—evidence that even amid strategic stalemates, humanitarian bridges can be built.
“We measure progress not by headlines about tanks,” said Dr. Leila Markovic, a humanitarian specialist who has worked in Ukraine. “We measure progress by whether an elderly man can get his medication on time, whether a mother can bring her child to school without fear. Exchanges, the return of bodies, these are the things that restore dignity.”
Questions for the reader—and a reminder of the stakes
So where does this leave us? Can talks convened in a city that straddles continents change the tide of a conflict that has remade maps, lives, and economies? Will prisoner swaps open the door to broader concessions? Or are they, as some fear, merely a human balm for a much larger and continuing violence?
What role do neutral venues and intermediary states play in a world where alliances are shifting? And how should ordinary citizens—those of us reading far from the front—hold our leaders to account when diplomacy is touted, but the artillery keeps speaking?
When Zelensky lands in Turkey, he brings with him not only proposals but an urgent plea: to keep human exchanges alive, to use diplomacy to reduce suffering, and to remind the world that in the calculus of war the human line always matters. Whether the partners across the table will respond in kind is the question that will shape the coming winter—for prisoners, for families, and for the fragile hope that a conversation can still, slowly, change the course of a war.
