U.S. and Russian diplomats met Thursday in Istanbul, looking for ways to smooth their embassy relationships in Moscow and Washington after frequent expulsion of each other’s diplomats and three years of American opposition to Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The meeting was the latest in a series of engagements between the countries, including a phone call earlier this month between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Working to restore U.S.-Russia relations was on the agenda last week at talks in Saudi Arabia between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, although the chief aim was to initiate talks to end the war. Putin hailed Trump’s overtures toward Russia during a speech at Thursday’s meeting of the Federal Security Service, applauding the “pragmatism and realistic view” compared with what he described as the “stereotypes and messianic ideological cliches” of his U.S. presidential predecessors. “The first contacts with the new U.S. administration encourage certain hopes,” Putin said. “There is a mutual readiness to work to restore relations and gradually solve a colossal amount of systemic strategic problems in the global architecture.” But the Russian leader said that “part of Western elites are still determined to maintain global instability” and could try to “disrupt or compromise the dialogue that has begun,” adding that Russian diplomats and security agencies should focus their efforts on thwarting such attempts. Leaders of some longtime U.S. allies in Europe have expressed strong concerns about Trump’s abrupt switch in U.S. foreign policy to adopt a more favorable view of Putin and Russia. Trump said Wednesday that Europe, not the U.S., should be responsible for enforcing any would-be Russia-Ukraine peace deal to protect Ukraine’s security against any new Russian invasion. In Riyadh, Moscow and Washington agreed to restore staffing at embassies, which in recent years were hit hard by mutual expulsions of large numbers of diplomats, closures of offices and other restrictions. A U.S. Embassy official in Ankara confirmed that the Istanbul talks focused on the issues affecting the operation of respective diplomatic missions. Moscow and Washington had no immediate comments after the negotiations, which Russian news agencies said lasted for more than six hours. Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the Russian parliament’s upper house, said during a visit to Turkey on Thursday that U.S.-Russia talks should help restore the “full-fledged work of our diplomatic missions.” “I’m sure that the agreements will be reached, and we will return to civilized communication, which was disrupted by the previous administration” of former U.S. President Joe Biden, she said in Ankara, according to Russian news agencies. Speaking during a visit to Qatar, Lavrov said that based on the outcome of the Istanbul talks, “it will be clear how quickly and effectively [the two countries] can move forward.” Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.