Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy says territorial disputes will be central, but Russia must be ready to end war it started.
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held talks in the United Arab Emirates, with the key issue of territory dominating the agenda as the United States pushes for an agreement to end the nearly four-year war.
The discussions in Abu Dhabi on Friday were the first direct public negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv on a plan being pushed by US President Donald Trump’s administration to end the conflict.
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“The talks commenced today in Abu Dhabi and are scheduled to continue over two days, as part of ongoing efforts to promote dialogue and identify political solutions to the crisis,” the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said territorial disputes would be a central issue in the discussions but stressed that “the most important thing is that Russia should be ready to end this war, which it started”.
In a statement shared on Telegram, Zelenskyy said he was in regular contact with the Ukrainian delegation, but it was too early to draw conclusions from Friday’s talks.
“We’ll see how the conversation goes tomorrow and what the outcome will be,” he said.
The discussions in the Emirati capital came a day after Zelenskyy met with Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – and hours after US envoy Steve Witkoff held late-night talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
Reporting from the Russian capital Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova said the talks between Putin and Witkoff lasted nearly four hours but did not resolve the main sticking points to reaching a deal – namely, territorial disputes and security guarantees.
“Russia demands that the Ukrainian army leave the Donbas region, which is unacceptable to Ukraine,” Shapovalova explained.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia’s insistence on Ukraine yielding all of Donbas – including the 20 percent of Donetsk which is still under Ukrainian control – was “a very important condition”.
Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yury Ushakov, who participated in Putin’s meeting with Witkoff, also said “it was reaffirmed that reaching a long-term settlement can’t be expected without solving the territorial issue”.
Meanwhile, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported that the discussions in Abu Dhabi included possible buffer zones and monitoring mechanisms.
For its part, Ukraine has demanded security guarantees from its Western allies, including the US, should a deal to end the war be signed, in order to deter Russia from invading again.
Ukrainians have faced widespread power outages this winter as Russian attacks on the capital Kyiv and other parts of the country target energy infrastructure, leaving thousands of families struggling to stay warm in freezing temperatures.
Before Friday’s talks began, Ukraine said Russian strikes had killed three people in the Kharkiv region and four people – including a father and his five-year-old son – overnight in the east.
Despite the continued fighting, Trump said this week that he believed both Putin and Zelenskyy wanted to reach an agreement to end the war.
“I believe they’re at a point now where they can come together and get a deal done. And if they don’t, they’re stupid – that goes for both of them,” the US president said.
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are last known to have met face-to-face in Istanbul last summer, in talks that ended only in deals to exchange captured soldiers.
The Kremlin said Russia’s delegation at the UAE talks, headed by Admiral Igor Kostyukov, is comprised of military officials, while Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev will hold separate talks with Witkoff on economic issues.
The US has confirmed that Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, are attending the talks along with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and NATO’s top general, US Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich.
The Ukrainian team includes Rustem Umerov, head of Ukraine’s national security and defence council; Andrii Hnatov, chief of the general staff, and Kyrylo Budanov, head of the presidential office.
