The next round of US-sponsored talks between and will take place next Sunday in Abu Dhabi, a US official said today, hailing progress made in two days of talks yesterday and today, which ended without an agreement.
“We saw a lot of respect in the room between the (two) sides because they were really looking for solutions,” the official told reporters, asking not to be named.
“We have reached some really substantial details and next Sunday, God willing, there will be another meeting where we will push this agreement towards its final approval,” he added.
“that the talks were constructive,” X said, adding that “new meetings may take place as early as next week,” as two days of talks between Ukrainian, Russian and US delegations ended today.
According to the US official, a meeting between the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, is “not far off” given the progress made in the talks, but other discussions will have to come first.
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met Friday and Saturday in Abu Dhabi to discuss the crucial territory issue, as Russian airstrikes plunged Ukraine into its worst energy crisis of nearly four years of war.
The Russian Foreign Ministry, commenting today on the prospects for further talks with Ukrainian delegations, said that Moscow remains open to a continuation of the dialogue, the Russian state news agency RIA reported.
Besides, an informed source told AFP that new meetings between Ukrainians, Russians and Americans are to take place next week aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
The meetings of the three delegations yesterday, Friday, and today in Abu Dhabi were held “in a constructive and positive atmosphere”, said a representative of the United Arab Emirates government, while a source who asked not to be named confirmed that new talks are planned for next week.
US pressure on Kiev for an agreement is increasing
Kiev is under increasing pressure from the United States to reach a peace deal in the war sparked by a full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, with Moscow demanding Ukraine cease hostilities before it.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the territory issue was at the center of trilateral talks involving Ukrainian, Russian and US officials, which were due to conclude on Saturday.
In a post on the Telegram app, Zelensky stressed that “the most important thing is that Russia is ready to end this war, which it started,” adding that he is in constant communication with Ukrainian negotiators. He stressed, however, that it is still premature to draw conclusions from Friday’s talks. “We will see how the discussion develops tomorrow and what the outcome will be,” he said.
For his part, Rustem Umerov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and head of the Ukrainian delegation, said that the main parameters for ending the war, as well as the “further logic of the negotiation process” were set in the talks.
The talks come a day after Zelenskiy met with US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
According to the Ukrainian president, an agreement on American security guarantees to Ukraine is ready and only the date and place for its signature by Donald Trump to be determined remain, as reported by Reuters.
Ukraine is seeking strong security guarantees from its Western allies in the event of a peace deal, in order to prevent another Russian invasion. Moscow, however, appears to show limited interest in ending the war.
Escalation of attacks on energy infrastructure
The talks come amid an intensification of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, which have left major cities including Kiev without power and heating, while temperatures have plunged well below freezing.
The head of the country’s largest private power producer, Maxim Timchenko, told Reuters the situation was approaching a “humanitarian catastrophe” and stressed that Ukraine urgently needed a ceasefire that would stop attacks on energy infrastructure.
Russia says it wants a diplomatic solution, but makes clear it will continue to pursue its goals through military means until an agreement is reached.
The thorn of Donbass
A major obstacle to the negotiations is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over the roughly 20 percent of the Donetsk region it still controls, an area of some 5,000 square kilometers.
Zelensky categorically rejects any concession of territory that Russia has not managed to capture after four years of a war of attrition. Polls show that Ukrainian society appears opposed to territorial concessions.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the demand to cede all of Donbas was a “very important condition” for Moscow.
A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Russia believes the so-called “Anchorage formula” — which Moscow says was agreed between Trump and Putin at a summit in Alaska last August — would give Russia control of the entire Donbas and “freeze” fronts elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Donetsk is among four Ukrainian regions that Russia said in 2022 it had annexed, following referendums that Kiev and Western countries called a sham. The international community, however, recognizes the region as part of Ukraine.
Russian proposal for frozen assets
Moscow has also proposed using much of the nearly $5 billion in Russian assets pledged to the US to finance the “reconstruction” of Russian-held areas in Ukraine. Kiev, with the support of European countries, requests the payment of war reparations.
Zelensky rejected the proposal, calling it “nonsense”.
The Ukrainian president had said from Davos that the talks in Abu Dhabi are the first trilateral contacts involving Ukrainian and Russian envoys and American mediators since the start of the war.
It is recalled that in 2024 Russian and Ukrainian delegations held their first direct meeting since 2022 in Istanbul, while in November a senior official of the Ukrainian intelligence services had contacts with American and Russian delegations in Abu Dhabi.
NATO wants to create an “automated zone” of defense on the border with Russia
NATO plans to strengthen its defenses on Europe’s border with Russia within the next two years, mainly by creating an “automated zone” of defense that will have equipment that will not require soldiers, a senior German officer told reporters today.
The defense plan in question would include a zone of defense that the enemy would have to cross to advance, a “kind of hot zone,” Brigadier General Thomas Lovin, deputy chief of staff of NATO’s land command in Izmir, told Sunday’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
Specifically, sensors will detect enemy forces and activate defense systems, such as armed drones, semi-autonomous combat vehicles, unmanned ground robots, as well as automated air and missile defense mechanisms, the brigadier general explained.
However, the final decision to use these weapons will remain “always the responsibility of humans”.
The sensors, which should cover a zone of thousands of kilometers, will be installed “on the ground, in space, in cyberspace or in the ethers,” according to Lovin.
They will be able to gather data on “the movements or use of weapons by the adversary” to inform “in real time all NATO countries,” he explains.
Existing weapons stockpiles will also be strengthened, deployed troops will be kept “at the same level” as today, and cloud computing and artificial intelligence will be used to guide the system, he concludes.
The first elements are already being tested in pilot programs in Poland and Romania.
The entirety of this NATO mechanism is to be operational by the end of 2027 if possible, according to information from Welt am Sonntag.
