Negotiators from Russia, Ukraine and the United States meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for two days of US-mediated talks. It is the first three-way round since February. Moscow and Kyiv both say the main subject is “security guarantees”, but they mean different things by the phrase.
US special envoy Steve Witkoff announced on X that the 10–11 November talks would be held at working level. They will cover post-war security arrangements, de-escalation and humanitarian issues. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the talks would cover mutual security guarantees for Russia and Ukraine. Kyiv means something narrower: Zelensky has said he wants US guarantees modelled on NATO’s Article 5 and backed by a vote in Congress.
The gap between those two definitions is the reason the talks have gone in circles for four years.
Tuesday will be the eleventh time Russian and Ukrainian delegations have sat at the same table since February 2022. None of the previous ten produced a ceasefire.
Belarus, 28 February–7 March 2022: three rounds, no agreement.
Istanbul, 29 March 2022: the two sides drew up a draft framework, which collapsed within weeks. Moscow and Kyiv still disagree about why.
Istanbul, 2025: three rounds on 16 May, 2 June and 23 July. They produced a “1,000-for-1,000” prisoner swap but no truce.
Abu Dhabi, 23–24 January and 4–5 February 2026, and Geneva, 17–18 February 2026: three trilateral rounds. Every one ended with US officials calling the talks “constructive” while no concrete agreement was reached. Geneva ended early, stalled over Russia’s insistence on keeping the territory it has taken.
Alongside these rounds came a series of US-led efforts that also failed to end the fighting: the US–Russia meeting in Riyadh in February 2025, the Trump–Putin summit in Alaska in August 2025, and the 28-point plan of November 2025. Before all of this came the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, which also collapsed.
A few things have held. Prisoner exchanges have taken place, and Abu Dhabi produced a 314-person swap in February. Former US ambassador William Taylor told RFE/RL that the expert meetings in January and February worked out technical questions, such as how a ceasefire could be monitored. They could not agree on the ceasefire itself.
The head of Russia’s delegation is presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky. Across the table sits Davyd Arakhamia, head of Zelensky’s parliamentary faction. In March 2022 the two held a one-on-one meeting in Istanbul before the full talks began. Arakhamia led Ukraine’s delegation then. This time he is part of a team led by Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
Each side tells the 2022 story differently. In 2023, Arakhamia said the war could have ended that spring if Ukraine had agreed to neutrality. He has also said he does not regret walking away, because Kyiv was offered no guarantees. The question that broke those talks is the one on the table tomorrow.
Moscow has strengthened its team. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who handles relations with Washington and arms control, joins for the first time. So do Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin, military intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov and General Staff officer Yury Zhigarlovsky. Bloomberg read the line-up as a possible sign that Moscow is ready for more substantive talks. Putin briefed the delegation at a Security Council meeting on 6 November.
The central disagreement has not moved since February.
Russia’s position is that Ukraine must withdraw from the part of Donbas it still holds. On 7 May, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said Kyiv “needs to take just one significant step”, meaning a pullout, after which fighting would stop. Until then, he said, there could be “dozens of rounds, but we will remain in the same place”. On Sunday Peskov said that, from a geographical point of view, Ukraine “is already a different country”.
Some Russian analysts say the dispute is less about territory than about Europe’s security order. In Vedomosti, Dmitry Suslov of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics said the real problem is “not only and not so much” Donbas. He said it is a European security system built to exclude Russia, and without fixing that the conflict will be frozen, not settled. MGIMO’s Ivan Loshkarev said Kyiv wants limited, short-term deals while Moscow wants all the settlement issues addressed at once.
Kyiv offers a ceasefire at the current line and nothing more. Zelensky has said Ukraine is ready “to freeze the front line”. He says Russia controls 19.3 percent of Ukraine and would reach 25 percent only if Kyiv gave up all of Donbas. He has ruled out ever legally recognising the loss of territory. After meetings with US and European officials in Brussels on 5 November, Umerov said the guarantees must be “not merely a political declaration but a system that works in practice”.
Each side’s leverage has shifted since February. The positions have not.
The process stopped in late February because Washington turned its attention to the war with Iran. It nearly restarted in September, but Russia’s parliamentary election got in the way. Moscow’s mayor said 450 drones were shot down on their way to the capital on the final day of voting. In an October call with Trump, Putin said, through Ushakov, that the attack had ruled out an immediate return to talks. The Kyiv Independent notes that Ukraine had publicly offered a reciprocal energy ceasefire before that attack. It also says Moscow’s claim that the drones targeted the election itself has not been independently verified.
Washington then eased pressure on Moscow. On 16 October Trump signed an order waiving new sanctions two days before they were due to take effect. These were the sanctions in the Graham sanctions law he had signed on 18 September. He said he did not want to drive Russia “away from the bargaining table” and accused Zelensky of not wanting the war to end. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukraine paused strikes on Russian oil refineries from mid-October under US pressure.
That pause appears to have had limits. On 3 November, the governor of Russia’s Yaroslavl region said about 124 Ukrainian drones targeted the oil refinery outside the regional capital. The same day, Ukrainian officials said Russia hit energy facilities in 10 regions with 17 ballistic missiles and nearly 300 drones. Moscow says its strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid are retaliation for Ukrainian attacks.
The third change came in Washington. Democrats won both chambers of Congress on 3 November. Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev told Izvestia that Trump has until 3 January, when the new Congress is sworn in, to lock in agreements. Matthew Boyse, a former US diplomat, told RFE/RL that Moscow may stretch the talks out, betting that Trump will be politically weaker.
The European Commission and the European Council are sending a joint team to Abu Dhabi, led by Bjoern Seibert and Anna-Maria Boura. France, Germany and the UK will also attend. Moscow says the format is closed. Peskov said European representatives cannot take part because “a trilateral format had been agreed upon from the outset”. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Europeans have no place at the table.
US envoy Jared Kushner has said a wider format would be organised only “if progress is made”. Inside the EU there are also complaints about the setup: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has written to European Council President Costa about “disarray” in the diplomatic formats.
Neither side expects much from this round. Ukrainian officials do not expect a major breakthrough and hope mainly to restart regular negotiations. Heather Conley, a US analyst, expects at most a follow-up meeting and sees more prisoner exchanges as the realistic outcome.
There is a recent model for smaller deals. In late October, a US-brokered local ceasefire in Russian-held Oleshky, mediated by Melania Trump, allowed aid to reach the town and civilians to leave. Russian and Ukrainian officials oversaw the operation on the ground. The Kremlin said it does not signal readiness for a wider truce. European Commission President von der Leyen backs Zelensky’s call for a ceasefire covering food and energy infrastructure. Boyse warns that Moscow may use local truces as leverage to win bigger concessions.
The talks end on Wednesday. EU leaders then meet informally in Dublin. Moscow, Beijing and Washington are discussing a possible Putin–Xi–Trump meeting at APEC in Shenzhen on 18–19 November. Trump’s sanctions waiver runs for 60 days. The new Congress is sworn in on 3 January.
Four years after Istanbul, the same two negotiators meet again, and the decisions that matter are being made in Washington and Moscow rather than at the table.