Second and Final Day in Abu Dhabi: US, Russian and Ukrainian Negotiators Resume Talks With No Breakthrough in Sight
Russian, Ukrainian and American officials opened a second day of peace talks in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday — the first negotiations between the warring sides since February, described by Washington as productive and by the calendar as finished after today, with the two sides still far apart on terms more than four and a half years into the war.
ABU DHABI — The talks resumed on Wednesday morning in the format Ukraine's top negotiator announced on Telegram. 'We are starting the second day of the talks,' Rustem Umerov wrote. 'First, there will be a trilateral format with the United States and Russia. After that, we will have a separate meeting with the European partners.' It is the last day of meetings scheduled, Reuters reported, and neither Moscow nor Kyiv gave details after Monday's first day.
The public language and the underlying positions point in different directions, and Reuters' account holds both. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the first day as very productive, without giving details, and President Donald Trump has expressed public optimism. But there has been no sign of major compromises, Reuters reported, more than four and a half years after Russia's full-scale invasion: Russian forces control about a fifth of Ukraine, and territory is not the only issue at stake.
Moscow's stated order of operations is itself a dividing line. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined on Tuesday that Russia prefers negotiating a broad European security framework before tackling the specifics of the war, and the Kremlin said on Wednesday that the Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi had not been in contact with European representatives there and that no such contacts were planned — even as Ukraine's delegation planned its own separate meeting with European partners after the trilateral session.
The war did not pause for the diplomacy. As the talks opened on Tuesday, Russian forces struck ten Ukrainian regions overnight in air attacks that targeted five major electrical substations, sparked widespread outages and killed two people, Ukrainian officials said. Whatever Wednesday produces — a leaders' summit discussion, a framework, or simply an adjournment — it will be measured against that arithmetic: two days of the first talks since February, and a war that continued through both of them.
