For the first time in nine months, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are sitting in the same room. The two sides, with American mediators between them, open two days of talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, 10 November — and Washington says something has shifted, quietly, behind closed doors.
Key takeaways
- The talks run 10–11 November in Abu Dhabi, the first trilateral round since Geneva in February 2026.
- A US official says both sides are privately showing “a little bit of flexibility” on territory — the issue that has sunk every previous round.
- The US delegation is led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner; Ukraine by intelligence chief Rustem Umerov, Russia by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky.
- Security guarantees for Ukraine — possibly modelled on NATO’s Article 5 — are expected to dominate, with territory left until the end.
- Europe is not at the table: Moscow says the format is trilateral only, though Kyiv plans separate coordination meetings with European partners.
The core dispute has not changed. Moscow wants Kyiv to hand over the parts of the Donetsk region it still controls; Ukraine wants the front line frozen where it is. Russia now occupies roughly a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea. Both governments have spent years insisting, in public, that their positions are not negotiable.
What is new is the private signal. Briefing reporters on Monday, a senior US official said both delegations had shown some potential for compromise on a territorial exchange — without saying what either side had actually offered. The same official was blunt about the limits: “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.”
That sequencing matters. Washington’s view is that no map can be redrawn until both sides know what protects Ukraine afterwards. Security guarantees are therefore expected to be the real subject of this round, including the possibility of a defence commitment for Kyiv modelled on Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty — the clause that treats an attack on one ally as an attack on all. The proposed framework also includes security consultations, emergency communication hotlines and reciprocal steps to lower military tensions. Officials have even raised reviving the NATO-Russia Council, dormant since 2022.
Neither side is conceding anything in public. A senior Ukrainian official strongly rejected the suggestion that Kyiv would accept territorial concessions, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Ukraine will not trade land for peace. The Kremlin, for its part, has not budged publicly from its demand for all of Donbas. The American reading is that the gap between the public positions and the private conversations is, for once, narrowing rather than widening.
The human arithmetic behind the talks has also sharpened. Leaked Russian death records obtained by The Guardian indicate that more than 400,000 Russians have been killed in nearly five years of fighting. Ukraine’s own losses are not published in comparable detail, but no family on either side of the front line needs a statistic to know the cost.
The last attempt at a trilateral format, in Geneva in February, ended without a breakthrough. Since then the war has ground on — and diplomacy has taken strange turns, including a US-declared energy ceasefire that neither side honoured for a single day. That history is why expectations in Abu Dhabi are deliberately low: American officials describe the purpose of this round as building momentum, not producing a settlement.
Why this matters
Peace talks fail most often not when the two sides disagree, but when each side believes the other cannot move at all. A credible report of private flexibility — even unquantified, even denied in public — changes the calculation for everyone watching, including European governments that have spent the war arguing over whether negotiation rewards aggression. The test in Abu Dhabi is narrow: can the three delegations agree on what security looks like after the war, so that territory can be discussed last instead of first? If they can, the hardest conversation of the war finally has a starting point. If they cannot, the talks will join Geneva on the list of rounds that ended with a handshake and nothing else — and the fighting, which has never paused for diplomacy, will simply carry on.
