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MOSCOW/WASHNGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. State Department on Tuesday announced that American and Russian delegations will meet for a second time in Istanbul on April 10 to "solely" discuss stabilizing bilateral embassy operations.
Speaking at a daily press briefing, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the discussions will not include any political or security issues.
"Ukraine is not, absolutely not on the agenda," Bruce said.
"These talks are solely focused on our embassy operations, not on normalizing a bilateral relationship overall, which can only happen, as we've noted, once there is peace between Russia and Ukraine," she added.
A diplomatic source earlier said the talks will take place at the Russian consulate in Istanbul.
In February, Russian and U.S. teams held talks in Istanbul to try to restore normal functioning of their embassies. The talks, focused narrowly on conditions for each other's diplomats, provided an early test of the two countries' ability to reset wider relations.
Russia and the United States have expelled diplomats and limited the appointment of new staff at each other's missions in tit-for-tat measures over the past decade, leaving their embassies thinly staffed.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Russian state-run TASS news agency reported that delegations from Russia and the U.S. would meet for consultations in Istanbul in the coming days, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The Russian delegation will be led by Alexander Darchiev, recently appointed as Russia's ambassador to the U.S., while the U.S. delegation will be headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Sonata Coulter, TASS reported.
Both delegations will be made up of only diplomats and the talks will focus on normalising the operations of the diplomatic missions of both countries, it quoted Russia's Foreign Ministry as saying.
U.S. and Russian officials also met in February in the Saudi capital Riyadh to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine, part of a broader rapprochement with Moscow sought by the new Trump administration.
(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington, Can Sezer and Ezgi Erkoyun in Istanbul and Maxim Rodionov in MoscowEditing by Andrew Osborn, Gareth Jones and Nick Zieminski)
