The United States will bring delegations from Ukraine and Russia together in Abu Dhabi on November 10–11 to discuss ending Moscow’s war against Ukraine, a senior US official has told Reuters. It would be the first US-mediated trilateral meeting of the two warring sides since February, and the first since the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran earlier this year that pushed Ukraine diplomacy off the agenda.
The talks, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, will cover ending the war, post-war security agreements and de-escalation. The lead US negotiators, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are expected to represent Washington. Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to the new round after meeting Witkoff in St Petersburg two weeks ago, the official said.
Before Abu Dhabi, American negotiators will meet at working level this week in Brussels with representatives from France, Germany, Britain, the European Union and NATO. That sequencing matters: previous rounds have collapsed when European allies felt presented with a finished deal rather than consulted on one. The Brussels session is designed to prevent a repeat.
The timing is tight. Winter is setting in, and US negotiators have been seeking a breakthrough before the coldest months, when fighting hardens into attrition and energy infrastructure becomes the main target. The war, now Europe’s bloodiest since World War Two, has continued through every previous diplomatic window — including the local Kherson ceasefire that expired at the weekend without an extension, and the bombing of an aid centre in Komyshuvakha that killed 26 people.
What happens next is genuinely uncertain, and the honest way to read this announcement is as a test of whether either side wants a deal badly enough to say so in the same room. A trilateral meeting is not a peace agreement. It is a room, a date and an agenda. The February round ended without one, and nothing since — not the ceasefire experiments, not the prisoner exchanges — has suggested the gap between Kyiv and Moscow has narrowed on the questions that matter: territory, security guarantees and what “post-war” even means while fighting continues.
But a date does change something. Deadlines force capitals to decide what they will accept, and the Abu Dhabi meeting gives both sides a week to do that arithmetic in private. Watch the Brussels meetings first: if Europe emerges aligned with Washington, the Abu Dhabi table will be harder for either side to walk away from. If it emerges divided, the meeting risks becoming another entry in a long list of talks about talks.
