After a gap of nine months, negotiators for Kyiv, Moscow and Washington are back in the same room. Meetings mediated by Washington begin in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and are scheduled to last two days, the first trilateral round since a February session in Geneva. In between, the American government was largely absorbed by its war with Iran.
Washington is represented by its peace envoy Steve Witkoff together with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Kushner was careful not to oversell the event, writing that at most it could “build momentum toward the next phase” of diplomacy. The agenda covers security arrangements for the period after the fighting, steps to lower tensions and humanitarian issues.
Moscow has again put Vladimir Medinsky, an adviser to Vladimir Putin, in charge; Sergei Ryabkov from the foreign ministry is part of the group for the first time, as is intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov. Rustem Umerov leads Ukraine’s delegation and plans side meetings to brief officials from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, NATO and the EU. Moscow insists the format at the table stays strictly three-way.
The biggest obstacle is Donetsk. Russia wants Ukraine to withdraw from the parts of the region it still holds; Kyiv wants the front line frozen where it is. One US official claimed both sides had privately shown “a little bit of flexibility”, but conceded that territory will not be settled until a postwar security framework exists. Ideas being floated include crisis hotlines, mutual de-escalation steps and reviving the NATO-Russia Council. A senior Ukrainian official flatly rejected talk of land concessions.
Volodymyr Zelensky argues that recent gains on the battlefield have strengthened his hand. On the eve of the meeting India offered to help set up food corridors between the two countries. Meanwhile the strikes continue on both sides, with Russia hitting Ukraine’s power grid and Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries, after a short-lived energy truce collapsed last month.
