Two days of talks in Abu Dhabi ended on Wednesday with the one thing nobody had dared to predict: an agreement. Russia and Ukraine will carry out the largest prisoner exchange of their nearly five-year war, both sides confirmed, in what the American mediators called the main humanitarian result of the first direct negotiations between the warring countries in nine months.
“One of the positives is we agreed that we’re going to have the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, which we’re going to finalise the numbers tomorrow,” Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of the two US envoys mediating the talks, said after the second day’s session ended. Rustem Umerov, who led Ukraine’s delegation, confirmed the deal as the “main result” of the talks, and Vladimir Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, said the sides had reached a “fundamental agreement” on a large-scale exchange, with details to follow.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had earlier indicated discussions of a 1,000-for-1,000 or possibly 1,500-for-1,500 format. Russian sources suggested more than 1,000 prisoners from each side, with the swap taking place within two to three weeks. Either way, it would be bigger than all the previous prisoner swaps of the war — exchanges that have continued even while the fighting raged and earlier rounds of diplomacy collapsed.
The talks themselves were brief. The talks that opened on Tuesday lasted about four hours; Wednesday’s session ran for less than two. Kushner described the discussions as “pretty tough” after almost eight months without direct contact, and was blunt about what stood in the way of anything bigger. “The reality is there is no trust right now between the sides and that is to be expected after a conflict like this,” he said.
On the questions that actually end wars — territory, security guarantees for Ukraine, and the broader European security framework — little progress was reported. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s rejection of European demands for an immediate ceasefire, and the two sides remain far apart on the terms of any settlement.
Kushner and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Moscow on Thursday to brief President Vladimir Putin on the discussions, then fly to Dublin to meet Zelenskyy, who is due to attend a meeting of European leaders there. One of their tasks in Moscow will be to raise the question of adding European partners to the talks — something Kushner said must happen. “Today we achieved an important humanitarian breakthrough,” he wrote on X, “with Ukraine and Russia agreeing in principle to what will be the largest prisoner exchange of the war.”
Why this matters
A prisoner swap does not end a war. But it does something a ceasefire has so far failed to do: it proves the two sides can still agree on something, in the same room, after nine months of silence. For the families of prisoners, that is everything — thousands of soldiers held for years could be home within weeks. For the diplomacy, it is a small, concrete foothold in a process that has produced mostly stalemate.
The scale of what is at stake was underlined this week by leaked death records suggesting more than 400,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine. Against that toll, a swap of a thousand or two prisoners is a modest thing. It is also the first time in nine months that Moscow and Kyiv have left a negotiating table with a deal of any kind. The test now is whether the numbers are finalised on Thursday — and whether the swap happens before the next round of fighting makes it irrelevant. Even as the talks ended, Russia and Ukraine exchanged strikes on each other’s capitals early on Thursday, a reminder of how thin the ground under this diplomacy really is.
