The first day of trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the US aimed at ending the war in Ukraine has concluded in Abu Dhabi.
While senior officials from Kyiv and Moscow were tight-lipped after the four hour-long discussions – due to resume on Wednesday – US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who did not attend the talks, said they had been “very productive”.
Although expectations for a breakthrough that ends Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine are low, US officials said earlier that Moscow and Kyiv were privately showing “a little bit of flexibility” on the issue of who would control Ukraine’s eastern regions in a postwar scenario.
At the start of Tuesday’s talks President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told delegates that the US had “narrowed the gaps” between the two sides, without providing details, and hoped to move towards a “solution that hopefully ends the war”.
Kushner said earlier the talks would be focused on addressing the “postwar security concerns” of both Russia and Ukraine.
He and Trump peace envoy Steve Witkoff also met Ukrainian and European and Nato officials on the sidelines of the main meeting.
European leaders have largely been excluded from peace talks until now, but they have pushed to be included in the discussions amid concerns that decisions about their continent’s security would be made without them.
The Americans appear to support this, with Rubio acknowledging during a visit to Paris that the Europeans “are a part of solving this problem for the long term”.
However, “the Russians have a bad taste in their mouth with the Europeans”, according to a US official.
Some proposals favoured 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 just allow Kyiv to regroup. “We will not agree to it,” he said.
Moscow and Kyiv’s positions are still far apart on ending the conflict.
A key area of disagreement involves Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk, which is mostly 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 maintain control over those areas, which it says are crucial to its future security.
While neither side has budged on these demands, the US official speaking on the eve of the talks suggested that this was just the public stance and that Moscow and Kyiv had shown “a little bit of flexibility, privately”.
However, he acknowledged 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 post-war “security architecture” may include reassurance that allies will come to its aid if it comes under attack again. For Russia, that could be its longstanding ambition to see Nato roll back from Eastern Europe – which would be alarming to Europeans.
The framework being proposed includes security consultations and crisis communications hotlines, as well as “reciprocal de-escalation measures” between the two. The officials also floated the re-activation of the Nato-Russia Council that has been largely paused since 2022.
The last round of trilateral talks, held in Geneva in February, ended without a breakthrough. Soon after, the US-Israel war on Iran diverted Washington’s attention from Ukraine, and no other discussions were held since.
From the start of his second term in office, US President Donald Trump – who once boasted he could end the war in Ukraine within a day – has spearheaded several rounds of talks to end the conflict, albeit with little success.
Meanwhile, his increasingly conciliatory approach towards Moscow has fuelled deep unease in Kyiv and across the European Union.
After meeting Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev in Washington last week, Trump touted a forthcoming “big, beautiful agreement” on Ukraine that “might involve all of Europe”.
Many in Ukraine are sceptical that this would result in a fair peace.
Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Merezhko, head of the foreign affairs parliamentary committee, told the BBC he believed Trump wanted “a quick deal at the expense of Ukraine”, which will certainly be rejected by Kyiv.
The only way to make Russia’s Vladimir Putin start real negotiations was by putting greater pressure on Russia through sanctions and deep strikes, Merezhko said.
“While Putin has a war machine up and running, he has no incentives to negotiate.” He also mentioned recent moves by Trump, such as his deal to buy diesel from Russia, as something that “only encourages Moscow to continue the war”.
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 have been part of previous negotiating teams, including Foreign Intelligence Service head Rustem Umerov, Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, and MP Davyd Arakhamiya.
Away from Abu Dhabi, Russia continues to pummel Ukraine with deadly bombardments and strikes on energy infrastructure, viewed in Kyiv as proof that Moscow wants to corner Ukraine into accepting a deal on Russia’s terms.
On Monday, Kushner was cautious to point out that the Abu Dhabi talks could at most “build momentum toward the next phase of negotiations”.
“This is an extraordinarily difficult and complicated conflict,” he wrote on X, adding the US was “approaching these discussions with determination and realism.”
