Key facts
- Kushner and Witkoff want the Abu Dhabi meeting to be the last without Europe's full participation, U.S. officials said.
- European security advisers from the U.K., Germany and France will be in Abu Dhabi but outside the main talks, the officials said.
- The officials said the first day covers security guarantees for Ukraine and Europe's security architecture.
- The second day would address territorial issues and where borders should be drawn, the officials said.
- NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has been heavily involved in the discussions, the officials said.
Donald Trump's envoys are pressing Russia to allow Europe to join the next round of negotiations aimed at resolving the Ukraine war, according to U.S. officials granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff will push the case for Europe to have a direct role in future talks as they mediate the first trilateral discussion with Russia and Ukraine since February, in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, the officials said.
Kushner and Witkoff want to step up the pace of the talks and for the meeting to be the last without Europe's full participation, the same officials said. "We need Europe at the table," one of the officials said. "So our proposal is to bring the Europeans into the discussion after this trilateral."
The officials welcomed the fact that the leaders of Finland and Norway called Russia's Vladimir Putin directly on October 27 and said more outreach is necessary. "We need a lot more European discussions with Russia so that they could be hearing what we're hearing and the message that they're conveying to us they could be conveying to Russia directly."
The question of who speaks for Europe, and whether Ukraine's European allies should be speaking to Putin at all, has been deeply divisive. EU leaders will discuss the topic at an informal summit in Dublin later this week.
Senior European officials are due in Abu Dhabi for the meetings, but although Kushner and Witkoff are expected to consult them, they will not be involved in the main negotiations due to Russian objections, the officials said. Those present include security advisers from the U.K., Germany and France, as well as officials from Italy, NATO, the European Commission and European Council.
The U.S. officials said the first day of the talks would focus on security guarantees for Ukraine and the potential reshaping of the security architecture of Europe. The second day would look at territorial issues, where borders and boundaries should be drawn, and other questions.
European governments fear that Trump may be preparing to agree to longstanding demands from Putin to roll back NATO's influence in the region. The U.S. officials insisted that NATO would still be central to Europe's collective defense, while refusing to back away from the need for a fundamental rethink of the continent's relations with Russia. "Obviously something's not working," the same official said. Europeans have "a lot of baggage" about redrawing the security architecture because Russia had proposed various changes in the past and previous arrangements had failed, the official said. "We have to build something new that works today."