Limited gains in rare Russia-Ukraine talks

Ukraine and Russia have wrapped up a second day of United States-brokered peace talks on Saturday in the United Arab Emirates, with no concrete agreement to end Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II, but both sides have agreed to reconvene for further negotiations in Abu Dhabi on Feb 1.

A UAE government statement said the talks featured "direct engagement" between Ukraine and Russia — a rare occurrence in the nearly four-year conflict — and that the discussions were held in a "constructive and positive atmosphere".

Prior to this round, the last known face-to-face negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators took place in Istanbul last summer, which yielded deals to exchange captured soldiers.

"We got to real granular details and next Sunday will be another meeting where we push this deal toward its culmination," a US official told reporters immediately after the talks. "This is a confirmation of the fact that a lot of progress has been made to date in really defining the details needed to get to a conclusion."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media that bilateral discussions focused on the "parameters for ending the war, as well as the security conditions required to achieve this".

"It is important that the conversations were constructive," he wrote.

The talks marked the first trilateral negotiations involving Russia, the US and Ukraine since the conflict erupted in February 2022. In attendance were US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, Russia's military intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov, chief of the Ukrainian President's Office Kyrylo Budanov, Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council Rustem Umerov, as well as other senior officials from both Russia and Ukraine.

Looking ahead to the Feb 1 negotiations in Abu Dhabi, the US official also expressed hopes for additional rounds of talks that could take place in either Moscow or Kyiv.

"Those sorts of meetings have to happen, in our view, before we get a bilateral between (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and Zelensky, or a trilateral with Putin, Zelensky and President Trump. But I don't think we're so far away from that," the official said.

Peaceful hopes

UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said on Friday that he hoped the Abu Dhabi talks would contribute to a peaceful end to the conflict.

According to the UAE's state news agency WAM, the country has facilitated 17 prisoner exchange deals between Russia and Ukraine since the start of the conflict, resulting in the release of a total of 4,641 detainees from both sides.

The initial US draft peace plan faced fierce criticism from Kyiv and Western European capitals for aligning too closely with Moscow's maximalist demands. For its part, Russia rejected revised versions of the draft over provisions calling for the deployment of European peacekeepers in Ukraine.

While diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have regained momentum, Moscow and Kyiv appear deadlocked over the issue of territory. Notably, Ukrainian officials said that Russian forces launched large-scale drone and missile strikes on several Ukrainian regions, including the capital Kyiv, during the course of the Abu Dhabi talks.

On the eve of the second day of the UAE negotiations, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said Russia had targeted Ukraine's critical energy infrastructure, leaving nearly 1.2 million people without power amid subzero temperatures across parts of the country. Moscow has not yet commented on the strikes.

Trump met with Zelensky on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, and US envoys Witkoff and Kushner later held high-level talks with Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow.

Hours after Putin met Witkoff and Kushner, the Kremlin said its demand that Kyiv withdraw from the eastern Donbas region still stood, calling it "a very important condition".

Kyiv has flatly rejected this Russian demand. "The Donbas issue is a key sticking point in the negotiations," Zelensky told reporters in Davos on Friday, ahead of the UAE talks.