Abu Dhabi will be hosting negotiators from Russia, Ukraine and the United States next week once again, as Washington tries to restart peace efforts that went quiet for most of this year.
The Kremlin confirmed on Tuesday, November 3, that the three-way talks will take place in the UAE capital on November 10 and 11. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, will lead Moscow’s delegation.
The confirmation came a day after US special envoy Steve Witkoff said the United States would mediate working-level negotiations in Abu Dhabi. According to Witkoff, the agenda will cover security arrangements after the war, de-escalation, humanitarian issues and next steps toward peace.
First talks since February
This will be the first round of US-brokered trilateral talks since negotiations stalled in February, before the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. The war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year.
Abu Dhabi has been here before. The UAE capital hosted the first publicly acknowledged three-way meeting between the US, Ukraine and Russia on January 23 and 24, followed by a second round on February 4 and 5. A third round took place in Geneva on February 17 and 18. None of them produced a breakthrough.
The biggest sticking point has not moved. Russia wants Ukraine to withdraw from the parts of the Donbas region it still controls, while Kyiv has said it will not sign a deal without security guarantees strong enough to prevent another invasion.
In late October, Peskov said the November meeting would focus on security for both countries once peace is reached. He also said Europe could not be left out forever if the talks moved on to wider European security, although the Abu Dhabi round itself will stay trilateral.
Talk of a Putin-Trump-Xi meeting
Peskov also said on Tuesday that Moscow hopes to finalise plans in the coming days for a meeting between Putin, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. No date or venue has been announced.
Expectations for next week remain modest. The Abu Dhabi round is set at working level, not between heads of state, and earlier rounds showed how hard it is to turn “constructive” talks into a signed agreement.
Why the UAE keeps hosting
The UAE has built a quiet role as a go-between in this war. It has brokered a series of prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, and in January President Putin publicly thanked the UAE for its help with those swaps and for organising contacts on its soil.
Hosting the talks again comes at a tense time for the Gulf. The UAE has been hit by Iranian attacks this year, and presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said at a security forum in Bahrain last weekend that the country hopes for diplomacy but is preparing for the worst. That backdrop makes Abu Dhabi’s willingness to host another round of Ukraine talks all the more notable.
What to watch
- Who leads Ukraine’s delegation, and whether senior US officials attend in person.
- Any movement on a ceasefire, prisoner exchanges or humanitarian steps, which have been the easiest areas to agree on.
- Whether a date emerges for the proposed Putin-Trump-Xi meeting.
Al Gulf News will update this story as the talks get under way.
Sources: Reuters via US News, CNBC, The Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, CBS News.
