First day of Ukraine peace talks constructive, Zelensky says

The first of two days 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, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was not at the talks, said they had proved “constructive and quite substantive”.

Speaking from Paris, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the meeting 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.

Zelensky also said that humanitarian issues such as prisoner of war exchanges had been discussed.

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 had 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.

Until now European leaders have largely been excluded from peace talks, 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.