Two diplomatic moves that surfaced by 28 September 2026

What had changed in the diplomacy around the war in Ukraine by 28 September 2026? Two developments from the preceding days stood out: a ministerial meeting between Berlin and Moscow, and the transfer of two captured North Korean soldiers to South Korea.

Berlin and Moscow talk

On 26 September 2026, during the eighty-first session of the United Nations General Assembly, German foreign minister Johann Wadephul and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov held talks. They were the first talks between Germany and Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The meeting took place on the sidelines of a multilateral gathering rather than in either capital.

Prisoners sent to Seoul

Three days earlier, on 23 September 2026, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine had transferred two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea. Ukrainian forces had captured the two men in Kursk Oblast, Russia, in January 2025.

The transfer sat within a wider story of North Korean involvement in the war. As background, North Korea recognised the Russia-backed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics in July 2022, and Ukraine responded by severing diplomatic ties with Pyongyang. The handover to Seoul therefore linked Kyiv with the capital of North Korea's rival, not with North Korea itself.

What the two events show

The two events were separate and involved different parties. Together they showed diplomacy moving along several tracks at once: a direct channel reopened between a major European government and Moscow, and a humanitarian-legal question over captured combatants resolved through a third country. Kyiv's own role was most visible in the second, where its president announced the decision.

For international readers, the German–Russian contact was notable mainly for its novelty, as a first conversation of its kind in more than four years. The prisoner transfer ended an open question about two men held since January 2025.