A new round of trilateral negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States is set to take place in Abu Dhabi today, 10 November. It is the first such meeting since February in Geneva, after which negotiations were suspended following the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The announcement follows two months of talks involving Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump's special envoy, and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The presence of Sergei Ryabkov, Russia's deputy foreign minister responsible for arms control and relations with NATO, suggests that Moscow intends to place security guarantees at the centre of the discussions. On Russia's insistence, EU representatives will not be included in the discussions. But with Moscow and Kyiv remaining deeply divided over what guarantees each should receive once the fighting ends, a significant breakthrough remains unlikely.
Russia's negotiating delegation will be led by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky. Ukrainian representatives accuse him of deliberately wasting time during previous rounds of negotiations that he led in Istanbul in the spring of 2022 and again last summer. In mid-December 2021, Ryabkov presented the provisions of two draft security treaties that Russia had submitted to the United States and NATO just weeks before its invasion of Ukraine. He subsequently negotiated their terms with US and European officials.
The proposals demanded that NATO withdraw its forces to their pre-1997 positions, pledge never to admit any former Soviet republic to the alliance, and refrain from deploying troops or weapons on the territory of those republics that could threaten Russian security. But these demands are so complex that resolving them could take many rounds of negotiations.
In the run-up to the talks, Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure and blockade of Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea. For its part, Ukraine has also escalated its attacks on Russian oil refineries, defying Trump's repeated appeals to stop.
Exploiting a window
The negotiations follow the Republicans' resounding defeat in the US midterm elections. Moscow may try to exploit the interim period to force Ukraine to accept its demands or make limited concessions, handing Trump a symbolic diplomatic victory at a time when he is facing a lot of heat at home for waging war on Iran.
In a significant development, a telephone conversation between Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has revealed a growing inclination among some European countries to also explore negotiations with Russia.
However, Moscow's continued insistence on its prewar demands could leave little room for progress. Foremost among these demands are the withdrawal of NATO forces to their pre-1997 positions and the establishment of a new European security architecture that would preserve Russian spheres of influence across the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. Such arrangements would effectively give Moscow the power to veto their accession to military alliances.
Statements by Russian officials in recent weeks have reaffirmed Moscow's determination to achieve its war objectives and address what it describes as the conflict's "root causes". Russia continues to demand that Ukraine withdraw from the four regions Moscow annexed in the autumn of 2022, relinquishing their entire territories within the administrative boundaries they held when Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the past two months, Russian forces have also intensified efforts to establish a buffer zone inside Ukraine's Sumy and Kharkiv regions, along the border with Russia's Kursk and Belgorod regions.
