US envoys to meet Putin and Zelenskyy after Abu Dhabi talks

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner plan to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday to continue a push for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, after a second day of talks between the sides in Abu Dhabi ended in less than two hours.

The envoys want to “try to make more progress on some of the issues that we discussed, because we see some openings and some opportunities there,” Kushner told reporters Wednesday. Territorial issues remain the hardest part of the negotiations, though the sides agreed on a substantial exchange of prisoners, he said.

Putin will meet Witkoff and Kushner on Thursday morning, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said, according to the Interfax news service. Ushakov said the talks in Abu Dhabi were substantive and useful.

The envoys plan to travel on to Dublin to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to debrief with him, and further explore some of the ideas that we came up with here today,” Kushner said.

The trilateral talks aimed at ending Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are the first since February, when President Donald Trump’s administration shifted its focus to the war with Iran. Russia and Ukraine remain far apart on many issues including on territory and security guarantees in the negotiations to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

The war that’s now deep into its fifth year has disrupted shipping in oil and grains, spurring increased energy and food prices globally.

There’s little sign of de-escalation, as Moscow has stepped up missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, logistics and business while Kyiv regularly strikes oil refineries and other targets deep inside Russia to try to curb the Kremlin’s war revenue. Fighting continues along the frontline, with neither side making significant gains.

Vladimir Medinsky, the leader of Russia’s delegation, declined to disclose details of the negotiations at a news briefing, but said broader European security arrangements were the “central topic” of the talks.

“We found common ground on some issues, but not on others. So the conversation will certainly continue,” Medinsky said. “The world needs a new, modernized and updated security system.”

The Russian team came with strict directives that were difficult to ease in discussions, lawmaker David Arakhamia, a member of the Ukrainian delegation, told reporters in Abu Dhabi. There are no results on Russian territorial demands and a military withdrawal from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, said.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly refused Putin’s demand to surrender territory in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces have failed to seize in fighting since 2014.

Both Ukraine and Russia want greater clarity on their post-war security position, Kushner told reporters. That will require European officials to be at the negotiating table and Europe should agree on who would represent them, he said.

One aim of the envoys’ meeting with Putin will be “to try and see if we can get Europeans added to the format,” Kushner said.

The leader of Kyiv’s delegation, Rustem Umerov, said before Wednesday’s meeting that Ukraine planned separate consultations with officials from European countries who were also present in Abu Dhabi.

The agreement on a prisoner exchange was the main result of the two days of talks, he said on the X platform after the talks concluded. “We are now working to finalize the details and further practical realization.”

Russia wants more progress in negotiations before any decision is made about a meeting between the two presidents, Kushner said. Details of the prisoner swap will be discussed in Moscow, he said.

The exchange will exceed 1,000 people on each side and may take place within two to three weeks, Russian General Staff official Alexander Zorin said, according to Interfax.

During a visit to Denmark earlier Wednesday, Zelenskyy said the second day of talks would “be about what can we do with any steps with energy ceasefire, or ceasefire on the sea, exchanging of our prisoners, and helping to prepare the meeting on the level of leaders.”

He called the first day of discussions on Tuesday “constructive and quite substantive.” The sides considered humanitarian steps, territorial issues and security guarantees for Ukraine, as well as a potential exchange of up to 1,500 prisoners each, he said.

It remains unclear what security guarantees Kyiv’s partners are ready to provide that would also be palatable for Moscow. Putin rejects membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for Ukraine and the presence of any Western troops in the country.

A senior U.S. official said Monday that the American team had asked Russia for its consent for the U.S. and Europe to provide security guarantees for Ukraine similar to those given under Articles 4 and 5 of the NATO treaty, in which an attack on any member country is treated as an attack on the alliance as a whole.

Russia is pushing for consideration of broader European security arrangements, something the Trump administration has indicated it’s willing to discuss. European nations want Russia to halt its war against Ukraine before entertaining any discussion about the continent’s broader security architecture, people familiar with the matter said.

Representatives from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, NATO and the EU met with the Ukrainian delegation in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday to align positions ahead of the talks, Umerov said in a post on X. They were joined by Witkoff and Kushner.

“It’s actually our goal at some point to expand this trilateral, so it’s not just the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters after a Group of Seven meeting in Paris on Tuesday. “But also that the Europeans be represented at that table directly with these talks.”

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