Russia, Ukraine begin second round of US-brokered peace talks in Abu Dhabi
MOSCOW: Ukrainian and Russian negotiators began a second round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, seeking to advance efforts to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War Two as fighting raged on.
The two-day trilateral meetings come after Ukraine’s President VolodymyrZelenskiy said Russia had exploited a US-backed energy truce last week to stockpile munitions, attacking Ukraine with a record number of ballistic missiles on Tuesday.
“Another round of negotiations has begun in Abu Dhabi,” said RustemUmerov, Ukraine’s top negotiator, on the Telegram app. “The negotiation process started in a trilateral format – Ukraine, the United States, and Russia.”
Photographs released by the United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry showed the three delegations sitting around a U-shaped table, with US officials seated at the centre, including special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Umerov said that teams would later meet in separate groups to discuss specific topics and would then follow up with a joint meeting to coordinate their positions.
Shortly after talks began, Russian forces struck a crowded market in eastern Ukraine with cluster munitions, killing at least seven people and wounding 15, the Donetsk region’s Governor VadymFilashkin said.
Major differences remain on key points: Trump’s administration has pushed both Kyiv and Moscow to find a compromise to end the four-year war, but the two sides remain far apart on key points despite several rounds of talks with US officials.
The most sensitive issues are Moscow’s demands that Kyiv give up land it still controls and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which sits in a Russian-occupied area.
Moscow wants Kyiv to pull its troops out of all of the Donetsk region, including a belt of heavily fortified cities regarded as one of Ukraine’s strongest defences, as a precondition for any deal.
Ukraine said the conflict should be frozen along the current front line and has rejected any unilateral pullback of its forces.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Russian troops would keep fighting until Kyiv made “decisions” that could bring the war to an end.
Russia currently occupies about 20% of Ukraine’s national territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region seized before the 2022 invasion. Analysts say Russia has gained about 1.5% of Ukrainian territory since early 2024.
“Russia is not winning its war against Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister AndriiSybiha told online media outlet Liga on Tuesday, arguing that Moscow was paying a heavy price in terms of battlefield casualties and economic harm for small territorial advances.
Ukrainians oppose painful concessions: Polls show that the majority of Ukrainians oppose a deal that hands Moscow more land. Kyiv residents told Reuters on Wednesday they were sceptical the new round of talks would bring any major breakthroughs.
“Let’s hope that it will change (something), of course. But I don’t believe it will change anything now,” Serhii, 38, a taxi driver, told Reuters. “We will not give in, and they will not give in either.”
The first round of talks was held in the UAE last month, marking the first direct public negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed their ties during a video call on Wednesday held in the run-up to the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said Xi – who it said supported this week’s talks – had invited Putin to China in the coming months. Beijing has sought to cast itself as a peacemaker in the war and is a close ally of Moscow, which is increasingly struggling to fund its vast war economy.
A source close to the government told Reuters that Russia’s public deficit could balloon to almost triple the official target by end-2026.
Several rounds of diplomacy between the sides have failed to strike a deal on ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, which began when Russia invaded in February 2022. The talks, set to last Wednesday and Thursday, were postponed from last weekend due to what the Kremlin called scheduling issues between the three sides.
Russia, which occupies around 20 per cent of its neighbour, has threatened to take the rest of the Donetsk region if talks fail. Ukraine has warned that ceding ground will embolden Moscow and that it will not sign a deal that fails to deter Russia from invading again. Kyiv still controls around one-fifth of the Donetsk region.
At the current pace of Russia’s advance, it would take Moscow’s army another 18 months to conquer it all, according to AFP analysis, but the areas remaining under Ukrainian control include heavily fortified urban hubs. Russia also claims the Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as its own, and holds pockets of territory in at least three other Ukrainian regions in the east.
The majority of the Ukrainian public is against a deal that hands Moscow land in exchange for peace, according to opinion polls. Many Ukrainians find the idea of ceding ground that its soldiers have defended for years as unconscionable.
On the battlefield, Russia has been notching up gains at immense human cost, hoping it can outlast and outgun Kyiv’s stretched army. Zelensky has been pushing his Western backers to boost their own weapons supplies and heap economic and political pressure on the Kremlin to halt the invasion.
Hundreds of thousands have been left without heat and power in the Ukrainian capital this year after massive Russian strikes severely damaged Kyiv’s energy grid.
Following the first round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi last month, Ukrainians were doubtful any deal could be struck with Moscow. “I think it’s all just a show for the public,” Petro, a Kyiv resident, told AFP. “We must prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” Web Desk
