ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates.- Russia, Ukraine and the United States concluded the first day of resumed trilateral peace talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday after more than four hours of negotiations, with the delegations expected to return to the table on Wednesday, the Kyiv Independent reported. The two-day session is the first trilateral meeting since February, when talks in Geneva failed to produce a breakthrough, and the first time the three sides have sat together in nine months.
The talks opened on Tuesday morning in the Emirati capital, with security guarantees for Ukraine at the top of the agenda. The first day concluded after nearly four hours, Russia's RIA Novosti news agency said, and the delegations are expected to resume on Wednesday, according to the press office of Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service, The Associated Press reported.
U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is mediating the talks with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, said he believed there were "some good ideas how to bridge" the differences between the two sides. In opening remarks, Kushner said the goal was to "create a new framework and a new understanding building upon the different institutions and understandings of the past."
"We take what's worked, we try to identify what's failed, why we're in this position and hopefully create a new framework that leads us for decades, if not centuries, of peace," Kushner said.
Who is at the table
Ukraine's delegation is led by Rustem Umerov, head of the country's Foreign Intelligence Service and Kyiv's top negotiator. It also includes President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov; his deputy, Serhii Kyslytsia; and Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary faction leader of Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party. Before the trilateral session, the Ukrainian team met with U.S. officials and representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, NATO and the European Commission.
Russia's chief negotiator is Vladimir Medinsky, a Putin aide who has led Moscow's team since the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul in March 2022. The Russian delegation also includes deputy foreign ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin, military intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov and senior General Staff officer Yuri Zhigarlovsky.
Medinsky expressed hope the meeting "will allow us to advance on the path towards peace in the interests of the people of Russia and the people of Ukraine." Umerov thanked the United States for its efforts and said: "Our people are waiting to end this war. And we hope that we will achieve lasting peace for Ukraine."
NATO commander U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who was also present, pointed to "some great progress in the past in a military-to-military dialogue in a trilateral format" and said the U.S. delegation looked forward to "working with both sides as we seek to advance the progress we've made in the past."
Still far apart on the core questions
Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on the key elements of any deal to end the full-scale war, which is now nearing its five-year mark. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to pull its troops back from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — the four regions Moscow illegally annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured — and demands that Ukraine abandon its bid to join NATO, accept strict limits on its military and drop restrictions on the Russian language and the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the AP reported.
Zelenskyy rejects Putin's demands to voluntarily cede territory that Russia has not been able to take on the battlefield. He also rejects any limits on Ukraine's military or its arrangements with Western partners, which Kyiv sees as essential security guarantees to stop Moscow from invading again. Ukraine argues that an immediate ceasefire is the necessary first step toward negotiating a wider settlement and says a direct meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy is the only way territorial issues can be settled.
The first day was devoted to security guarantees and a possible overhaul of Europe's security architecture; territorial issues, including borders and lines of separation, are expected to be discussed on the second day. Kyiv hopes to use the technical-level talks to discuss prisoner exchanges and a possible maritime and energy ceasefire, while laying the groundwork for a future summit at the leaders' level.
Expectations are deliberately low. Arakhamia said he does not expect a breakthrough in the first round of talks but is more hopeful about the second. "There has been a long pause in the negotiations. So, in terms of the domestic situation, simply resuming the talks is already an achievement," he told Deutsche Welle. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday night: "I don't have overly high expectations" for the talks.
A broader European security deal — and a war that has not paused
The White House has framed the Abu Dhabi session as the start of something wider than Ukraine alone. Last week, Trump declared that a grand deal about European security was in the works, describing it as "a big agreement" that is "going to involve more than Ukraine." Kushner said on X that a "comprehensive and lasting settlement will also require direct engagement between Russia and our European partners on the broader security arrangements that affect them," and that the Abu Dhabi discussions will set the stage for "that engagement to begin in the near future, as part of a broader multilateral process."
Moscow has praised the broad approach. "We can only welcome the (U.S.) negotiators on President Donald Trump's request proposing to put the issue of collective security on top of the agenda of the talks on a Ukrainian settlement," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. Russia has objected to the Europeans joining the three-way talks themselves, but said EU representatives could join at a later stage. Just before Moscow launched the all-out invasion in 2022, it demanded that NATO roll back its deployments in Central and Eastern Europe — similar demands are likely to be part of any comprehensive peace deal proposed by Russia.
Meanwhile, the G7 foreign ministers turned their attention to Ukraine in Paris on Tuesday, meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha as the Abu Dhabi talks got under way. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was among those in Paris, where European diplomats have been pressing for a seat at the table.
There are no signs the fighting is abating. While the ground battles have become a war of attrition along a roughly 1,200-kilometre (750-mile) front line, Russia and Ukraine have ramped up their long-range strikes. Russia launched 162 drones and a ballistic missile at Ukraine overnight, Ukraine's air force said, while Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces shot down 155 Ukrainian drones overnight above eight Russian regions and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. Russia has intensified its air campaign against Ukraine's power grid as winter sets in, while Ukraine has escalated its drone strikes on Russian oil refineries.
What remains to be confirmed
No details of the first round have been released beyond the fact that it lasted more than four hours and will continue on Wednesday. It is not yet known whether the two sides agreed on anything concrete — on prisoner exchanges, a maritime or energy ceasefire, or the security-guarantee framework that dominated day one — or whether the second day's discussion of territory will narrow the gap on the four annexed regions. Trump said in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" broadcast on Nov. 8 that he believed the war would end soon, adding that Ukraine could emerge from a settlement in "a different shape," but no terms of any deal have been made public.
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Sources: Kyiv Independent, 10 November 2026 (published 08:40 UTC, updated 13:14 UTC); The Associated Press via The New Indian Express, 10 November 2026 (updated 13:19 IST); The Associated Press via The Week, 10 November 2026. Cover photo (archive): Abu Dhabi Corniche skyline at night, Sabithnav via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; flag of the United Arab Emirates, drawn by The Wire Post. The image does not show the talks.