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Abu Dhabi Peace Talks: Ukraine and Russia Are Back at the Table, and the Lines That Have Not Moved
Updated: 2 minutes ago
In brief: For the first time since February, US, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators are meeting face to face, in Abu Dhabi, to try to end a war now in its 1,721st day. The agenda is security guarantees, the positions on territory and NATO have not moved, and the drones kept flying the whole time.
Part of our Ukraine War Analysis coverage.
On the morning the Abu Dhabi peace talks opened, Ukraine's air force was still counting drones. Russia had sent 162 of them overnight, along with a ballistic missile, while the delegations that are supposed to end the war settled into a conference room in the United Arab Emirates. That split screen is the whole story of November 10.
What the Abu Dhabi peace talks are actually about
The two-day session that began Tuesday is the first trilateral meeting between the United States, Ukraine and Russia since February, when a round in Geneva ended without a breakthrough, per CBS News and the Associated Press. The White House said beforehand that the focus would be security guarantees: the question of what the West would actually do if Russia invaded again. Ukraine's delegation is led by Rustem Umerov, the head of its Foreign Intelligence Service, who wrote that the agenda covers "key questions related to ending hostilities and moving closer to peace," per the Kyiv Independent.
Alongside Umerov are Kyrylo Budanov, David Arakhamia and military-intelligence deputy Vadym Skibitsky. The US team is Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Russia's is led by Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, with deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, who helped draft Moscow's pre-invasion demands to NATO and is joining the Ukraine file for the first time, and military-intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov, per ABC News. Kyiv says it wants to use the technical-level talks for prisoner exchanges and a possible maritime and energy ceasefire, and to lay the groundwork for an eventual leaders' summit.
The two positions that have not moved
Strip away the venue and nothing about the substance has changed. Vladimir Putin still wants Ukraine to pull its troops out of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, the four regions Moscow claimed to annex in 2022 but never fully took, to abandon its NATO bid, and to accept limits on the size of its army, per CBS and ABC. Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected ceding land Russia could not take on the battlefield, rejected any cap on Ukraine's military, and insisted on concrete guarantees from the United States and NATO allies, including a European-led reassurance force and protections modeled on NATO's Article 5, per the Kyiv Independent.
Each side is now also talking about its own security. Zelensky says Russia is using the words "security guarantees" to mean a rollback of NATO's presence in Eastern and Central Europe. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday the talks would put "security issues concerning Russia, Ukraine and the region as a whole" at the top, per ABC News. Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs Ukraine's parliamentary foreign affairs committee, told ABC he has "absolutely no hopes" beyond a prisoner swap, calling Putin's demands "absurd" and amounting to "surrender."
Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, public domain
What is new, and what is just louder
There is one genuinely new element. Both Russian and American officials said the Abu Dhabi talks would touch on broader European security arrangements, which RAND's Samuel Charap told ABC "seems to be new," while cautioning that after a nine-month gap "they're not going to come to some radically more ambitious agreement." Jared Kushner framed the meeting as an opening move, writing that a "comprehensive and lasting settlement will also require direct engagement between Russia and our European partners." This is the same track that the October Oslo peace talks opened and the Witkoff-Putin meeting carried forward.
Donald Trump, who promised to end the war in 24 hours and has not, told CBS's "60 Minutes" it would end "soon" and "only because of me," and suggested Ukraine would come out "a little bit different shape." On Nov. 5 he met Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev and announced a "big agreement" that would involve more than Ukraine. Europe is in the building but not at the table: national security advisers from France, Germany, the UK and Italy, plus NATO and EU officials, are meeting Ukraine and the US separately, because Russia objected to their presence and would allow EU representatives in only "at a later stage," per the CBC and the Kyiv Independent.
Photo: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0
The war that did not pause for the talks
None of this slowed the fighting. On the night of Nov. 8-9, Ukrainian drones set fire to the Kirishi refinery in Leningrad Oblast, Russia's second largest at around 20 million tonnes a year and under Western sanctions; the regional governor said 113 drones were downed over the region and a woman was killed by falling debris, per the Kyiv Independent and Ukrinform. It was the latest move in the same deep-strike campaign on Russian refineries Kyiv has run all autumn.
Russia answered in kind. Overnight into Tuesday it launched 162 Shahed-type drones, 96 of them jet-powered, and one Iskander-M ballistic missile from the Millerovo area; the air force reported 135 shot down or suppressed by 07:30, with impacts at 19 locations, per Ukrinform. The state power company Centrenergo said the Trypillia thermal plant, which feeds Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr, was hit again with "extremely serious" damage, warning that Russia now combines ballistic missiles and jet drones against a single target faster than the defenses can adapt. More than 600,000 people were left without power, authorities said, per CBS. A care home in Pereiaslav was damaged, a worker was killed at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and Kherson reported one person dead and six wounded.
Photo: DSNS via ArmyInform, CC BY 4.0
Why it matters
The gap between the table and the sky is the point. Russia has spent the autumn trying to put Ukraine's grid out before winter and, as Zelensky warned on Nov. 9, to split the country by knocking down the bridges over the Dnipro. Negotiating while the energy war peaks hands Moscow leverage it does not have on the front, where Ukrainian counterattacks have clawed back ground this year. For Kyiv, simply getting Russia back into a trilateral room after nine months is, as Arakhamia put it, "already an achievement" for the domestic mood, even if he expects nothing concrete from the first day.
What to watch
Watch whether the talks produce anything tangible, which on past form means a prisoner exchange rather than a ceasefire. Watch the energy and maritime ceasefire idea Kyiv floated, and whether Russia, which has rejected an unconditional ceasefire every time, engages with it at all. Watch for Russian-sourced claims of progress: TASS, citing sources close to the Moscow delegation, floated a supposed understanding that Ukraine would not join NATO, which Kyiv has not confirmed. And watch the Europeans in the side room, because the one new thread here, a wider European security deal, is the one Washington says will decide whether any of this holds.
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Read next: Oslo Peace Talks: Witkoff Flies In With a Deal on Russia's Terms and Witkoff Putin Meeting: The Lines Russia Will Not Cross.
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Do you think this round in Abu Dhabi produces anything real, or is it another imitation of negotiation while the grid burns? Tell us in the comments, and tell the channel what you want us to dig into next.
Sources
CBS News / AP (Nov. 10, 2026); ABC News (Nov. 10, 2026); The Kyiv Independent (Nov. 10, 2026); CBC / AP (Nov. 10, 2026); NPR (Nov. 10, 2026); Ukrinform (Nov. 9-10, 2026); Air Force of Ukraine via Ukrinform (Nov. 10, 2026); Centrenergo via Ukrinform (Nov. 9, 2026); Ukrainska Pravda (Nov. 9, 2026); Al Jazeera (Nov. 9, 2026). Photos: U.S. Department of Defense (public domain); Kremlin.ru (CC BY 4.0); DSNS via ArmyInform (CC BY 4.0).
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