Abu Dhabi, day one: security architecture first, borders later

Negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States meet in Abu Dhabi today, the first such trilateral round since Geneva in February, AFP reports². Reuters describes two days of talks⁴. Neither Vladimir Putin nor Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends; US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner host².

The sequencing. A US official told reporters that Moscow and Kyiv had privately shown “a little bit of flexibility” on who controls Ukraine’s east after the war, the BBC reports, but added: “They will not solve the Donetsk issue and the territorial issue until they know what the security architecture is going to be after the war”¹. The framework floated by US officials includes security consultations, crisis-communication hotlines, “reciprocal de-escalation measures” and reactivating the NATO-Russia Council, largely paused since 2022¹. Kushner wrote that the round could at most “build momentum toward the next phase of negotiations”¹.

The gap. Publicly, nothing has moved: Moscow demands that Ukraine give up the parts of Donetsk it still holds; Kyiv wants to freeze the contact line^1,2. A senior Ukrainian official told AFP: “We don’t have any particular expectations”². Sergei Ryabkov, the diplomat who issued the ultimatum on NATO troops in eastern Europe shortly before the 2022 invasion, joins Russia’s delegation for the first time². On the eve of the talks Zelenskyy said battlefield results “strengthen us in negotiations”³.

Europe’s chair. The US official said Washington would propose a multilateral format bringing Europeans in, while acknowledging Russian reluctance¹. The Kremlin says the talks remain “trilateral”².

For you, the useful posture is the dull one: count what is agreed in writing, not what is said in interviews. A hotline is not a peace. It is the kind of small, checkable machinery from which one can be built.