The first of two days of trilateral talks among Ukraine, Russia and the United States aimed at ending the war in Ukraine wrapped up in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling the session “constructive and quite substantive.”
Zelensky, who did not attend the meetings, spoke from Paris. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also in Paris, described the meeting as “very productive.”
Senior officials from Kyiv and Moscow made no public statements after the four-hour discussions, leaving the two presidents’ and the secretary of state’s characterizations as the main public readout of the day.
Expectations for a breakthrough that would end Russia’s full-scale war are low. Ahead of the talks, US officials said Moscow and Kyiv were privately showing “a little bit of flexibility” on the question of who would control Ukraine’s eastern regions in a postwar scenario.
Zelensky said humanitarian issues, including prisoner-of-war exchanges, were discussed.
Kushner cites narrowed gaps
At the start of Tuesday’s session, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, told delegates that the United States had “narrowed the gaps” between the two sides. He did not provide details, and said Washington hoped to move toward a “solution that hopefully ends the war.”
Kushner had said earlier that the talks would focus on addressing the “postwar security concerns” of both Russia and Ukraine. He and Trump peace envoy Steve Witkoff also met Ukrainian, European and NATO officials on the sidelines of the main meeting.
European leaders have until now been largely excluded from peace talks, but have pushed to be included amid concerns that decisions about their continent’s security would be made without them. The Americans appear to support their participation: Rubio acknowledged during his visit to Paris that the Europeans “are a part of solving this problem for the long term.”
Still, one US official noted that “the Russians have a bad taste in their mouth with the Europeans.” Proposals favored by EU officials, such as calling an unconditional ceasefire as a prerequisite for peace negotiations, are routinely rejected by Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that a truce would simply allow Kyiv to regroup. “We will not agree to it,” he said.
Donetsk remains the central obstacle
The positions of Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on ending the conflict. A key area of disagreement is Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk, most of which is occupied by Russia. Moscow has demanded that Ukraine relinquish the parts of Donetsk it still holds, while Kyiv wants to freeze the contact line to keep control of those areas, which it says are crucial to its future security.
Neither side has budged publicly on those demands. The US official who briefed ahead of the talks suggested that this reflected the public stance and that Moscow and Kyiv had shown “a little bit of flexibility, privately.” The official nonetheless acknowledged that the issue would not be solved without discussions about a new “security architecture.”
“They will not solve the Donetsk issue and the territorial issue until they know what the security architecture is going to be after the war,” the official said. “And keep in mind, we’re not going to be able to finalise one without the other.”
For Ukraine, a postwar security architecture could include assurances that allies will come to its aid if it is attacked again. For Russia, it could mean its longstanding ambition of seeing NATO roll back from Eastern Europe, a prospect that would alarm European governments.
The framework under discussion includes security consultations and crisis communications hotlines, as well as “reciprocal de-escalation measures” between the two sides. Officials also floated reactivating the NATO-Russia Council, which has been largely paused since 2022.
Delegations and a stalled track record
The last round of trilateral talks, held in Geneva in February, ended without a breakthrough. Soon afterward, a US-Israeli war with Iran diverted Washington’s attention from Ukraine, and no further discussions were held until now.
Since the start of his second term, Trump, who once said he could end the war in Ukraine within a day, has led several rounds of talks to end the conflict with little success. His increasingly conciliatory approach toward Moscow has fueled deep unease in Kyiv and across the European Union. After meeting Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev in Washington the previous week, Trump promoted a forthcoming “big, beautiful agreement” on Ukraine that “might involve all of Europe.”
Moscow’s delegation in Abu Dhabi includes Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky, deputy foreign ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin, spy chief Igor Kostyukov and army general Yury Zhigarlovsky. Kyiv has sent several senior officials who served on previous negotiating teams, including Foreign Intelligence Service head Rustem Umerov, Zelensky’s chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, and lawmaker Davyd Arakhamiya.
Many in Ukraine are skeptical that the process will produce a fair peace. Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian MP who heads the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said he believed Trump wanted “a quick deal at the expense of Ukraine,” which Kyiv would certainly reject. The only way to bring Russia’s Vladimir Putin into real negotiations, Merezhko said, is greater pressure on Russia through sanctions and deep strikes. “While Putin has a war machine up and running, he has no incentives to negotiate.” He pointed to recent US moves, including a deal to buy diesel from Russia, as steps that “only encourages Moscow to continue the war.”
Beyond Abu Dhabi, Russia continues to bombard Ukraine, striking energy infrastructure in attacks Kyiv views as evidence that Moscow wants to corner Ukraine into accepting a deal on Russian terms. Kushner, for his part, was cautious about what the Abu Dhabi round could achieve, saying it could at most “build momentum toward the next phase of negotiations.”
“This is an extraordinarily difficult and complicated conflict,” he wrote on X, adding that the United States was “approaching these discussions with determination and realism.”