Key facts
- A US official said Moscow and Kyiv had shown "a little bit of flexibility, privately" on who controls Ukraine's eastern regions after the war.
- The official said the Donetsk issue cannot be solved without agreement on a postwar security architecture.
- The proposed framework includes security consultations, crisis hotlines and "reciprocal de-escalation measures".
- Officials floated reactivating the NATO-Russia Council, largely paused since 2022.
- Moscow's delegation includes Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky and deputy foreign ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin.
- Kyiv's team includes Foreign Intelligence Service head Rustem Umerov and Zelensky chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov.
Senior officials from Moscow, Kyiv and Washington were due to meet in Abu Dhabi for the first trilateral talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine since February, a US official said on the eve of the meeting, in comments reported on November 10, 2026. The official said the two sides were privately showing "a little bit of flexibility" on the question of who would control Ukraine's eastern regions in a postwar scenario, while their public positions remain far apart.
A central disagreement concerns Donetsk, which is mostly occupied by Russia. Moscow has demanded that Ukraine give up the parts of Donetsk it still holds, while Kyiv wants to freeze the contact line to keep control of those sections, which it says are crucial to its future security. The US official said the Donetsk and territorial issues would not be solved until the parties know what the postwar security architecture will be, and that neither could be finalized without the other.
The framework being proposed includes security consultations and crisis communications hotlines, as well as "reciprocal de-escalation measures" between the two sides. Officials also floated reactivating the NATO-Russia Council, which has been largely paused since 2022. For Ukraine, a postwar security architecture may include reassurance that allies will come to its aid if it is attacked again; for Russia, it could mean its longstanding ambition to see NATO roll back from eastern Europe.
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and part of the US delegation alongside peace envoy Steve Witkoff, said on X that the talks would focus on addressing the "postwar security concerns" of both Russia and Ukraine. "An important part of this process is encouraging all parties to begin thinking seriously about what comes after the war," he wrote. On Monday, Kushner said the Abu Dhabi talks could at most "build momentum toward the next phase of negotiations," adding that the US was "approaching these discussions with determination and realism."