Key takeaways:
- The two-day Abu Dhabi talks are the first trilateral session since negotiations in Geneva ended without a breakthrough in February.
- Russia wants Ukraine to surrender the parts of Donetsk it still holds; Kyiv wants to retain them and seeks security guarantees.
- European officials say they plan to attend the Abu Dhabi discussions, but the Kremlin says Europeans will not participate in the trilateral negotiations.
The United States, Russia and Ukraine began two days of talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, returning to negotiations over the war in Ukraine with security guarantees and disputed territory high on the agenda. A US official said Moscow and Kyiv had privately shown some flexibility over territory, though their public positions remain far apart.
The meeting is the first trilateral session since talks in Geneva in February ended without a breakthrough. It is the third round held in Abu Dhabi this year, following meetings there in January and February. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are representing Washington. Russia’s delegation is headed by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky, while Ukraine’s team is led by Rustem Umerov, head of its Foreign Intelligence Service. Other Ukrainian participants include presidential chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov and lawmaker Davyd Arakhamiya, according to the BBC.
Kushner said on X that the talks would address the “postwar security concerns” of Russia and Ukraine and could “build momentum toward the next phase of negotiations.” He and Witkoff were working toward a solution that would provide for a “sovereign, secure, and prosperous Ukraine,” he wrote.
The central territorial dispute concerns Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Moscow demands that Kyiv surrender the areas it still controls; Kyiv wants to freeze the current line of contact and retain those positions, which it considers vital to its security. Russia also claims Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, four regions including Donetsk that it annexed in 2022 but has not fully captured. Ukraine has rejected demands to cede territory Russia has not taken on the battlefield and says a ceasefire should precede a wider settlement.
An anonymous US official said on Monday that both sides had shown “a little bit of flexibility, privately,” but cautioned that territorial questions and future security arrangements could not be settled separately. According to Al Jazeera, the official said discussions on guarantees for Ukraine could include a defence commitment modelled on Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.
European participation remains contested. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France, Britain and Germany “will indeed be in the meeting room,” the BBC reported. Al Jazeera reported that European powers and the European Commission planned to send officials. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, however, said Europeans would not take part in the negotiations, which had been agreed as a three-way format. European leaders have pressed for a role in decisions about the continent’s future security.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that Ukrainian forces were strengthening Kyiv’s negotiating position and that Russia was “suffering record losses,” a claim Moscow disputes. He urged Washington to persuade Russia to end the war. President Donald Trump told reporters he saw a “very strong inclination” toward ending it, saying both sides were “tired of fighting.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was more guarded, saying the effort still has “a ways to go.”
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