Russia, Ukraine and the US reopen peace talks in Abu Dhabi as Europe presses for a seat on security guarantees

Negotiators from the United States, Russia and Ukraine sat down in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for their first trilateral talks since February, reopening a diplomatic track meant to end the nearly five-year war even as Ukraine, France and the European Union warned that any settlement reached without Europe's direct involvement would not hold.

The two-day session, hosted by the United Arab Emirates, is the third round of what the UAE's foreign ministry calls trilateral talks between the three countries, following rounds in January and February that produced prisoner exchanges but no political breakthrough. The gap since the last meeting was in large part a product of the United States' and Israel's intervening war against Iran, which consumed much of the Trump administration's diplomatic bandwidth for several months.

Delegations and an opening agenda

The American side was led by envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Russia's delegation by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, and Ukraine's by Rustem Umerov, according to delegation lists carried in France 24's rolling coverage of the talks. UAE Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan attended the opening session and, in a statement issued by his ministry, said the talks were intended to "promote dialogue and strengthen diplomatic endeavors" toward a political solution.

"The UAE has deep-rooted partnerships with all three parties," Sheikh Abdullah said in the ministry's readout of the session, adding that the Emirates sees its role as "a trusted partner in fostering an environment conducive to dialogue."

The agenda, as described by delegates on the first day, covers ending the war; localized truces as a step toward a wider ceasefire; and what Kushner described as a new security framework spanning Ukraine, Russia and Europe. Witkoff said the talks would build on, rather than replace, existing European security institutions. A Kyiv delegation source told France 24 the first day's session had wrapped up by early afternoon local time, with a second round of meetings to follow on Wednesday.

The scale of a war approaching its fifth year

The talks come as the conflict, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, grinds toward a fifth year with no ceasefire in place. The United Nations human rights office has verified more than 15,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine since the invasion began, a figure UN monitors describe as a minimum because many casualties in Russian-occupied territory cannot be confirmed. The toll has continued to climb this fall: at a Security Council session convened a day before the Abu Dhabi talks opened, a UN political affairs official said at least 328 civilians were killed and 2,105 injured in Ukraine in September alone, an 85 percent increase over the same month a year earlier. The previous two rounds of Abu Dhabi talks, in January and February, yielded prisoner exchanges but ended without a joint political statement, leaving territory and the shape of any post-war security guarantees unresolved.

Europe's demand for a place at the table

The talks' most contentious thread is not Abu Dhabi itself but who gets to shape what follows it. European governments were not seated at Tuesday's trilateral table, but the US held preparatory consultations in Brussels on November 4 and 5 with France, Germany, Britain, the European Union and NATO on Ukraine's security guarantees and the broader shape of European security after the war. A joint US-European-Ukrainian statement issued around those consultations reaffirmed support for a "strong post-war European security architecture," with NATO "central to collective defence," and said Ukraine's territorial integrity must be respected. NATO's own position, as laid out on its website, is that it "welcomes the efforts to negotiate a just and lasting peace as soon as possible" while stressing that Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, is not covered by the alliance's Article 5 mutual-defence guarantee and would need bespoke security arrangements instead.

In Paris, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot welcomed the American push for localized truces on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers' meeting; Sybiha separately met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the state of the battlefield and navigation rights in the Black Sea. The French presidency said there could be no lasting peace in Ukraine without addressing European security, and no European security arrangement without European involvement in shaping it.

Russia's position, voiced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the mirror image: Moscow will not agree to an immediate ceasefire without clarity on what follows it, he said, arguing that the broader European security architecture should be settled before, not after, any halt in fighting — a sequencing that would effectively let Russia use the pace of a ceasefire as leverage over the terms of a wider settlement.

What is unresolved, and what comes next

President Donald Trump has signaled in recent remarks that any settlement is likely to require Ukraine to accept some territorial changes, a prospect that has unsettled both Kyiv and European capitals, which fear a deal that amounts to a de facto capitulation dressed up as a settlement. Territory remains the single largest obstacle separating the Russian and Ukrainian positions, a divide that neither of the first two Abu Dhabi rounds narrowed.

Tuesday's session was not expected to produce a final agreement; delegates and outside officials have instead framed it as groundwork for a possible future meeting between Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Talks were due to resume in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, with no announced deadline for a broader deal, though US officials have said they are seeking a breakthrough before winter deepens the war's toll on both Ukraine's energy grid and the front line.