US, Russia and Ukraine to restart talks in Abu Dhabi

Moscow and Kyiv have widely divergent demands regarding the conflict in Ukraine, which began when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to pull its forces out of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which are the regions that Moscow illegally annexed in September 2022 without seizing all the territory they contain.

He also says Ukraine must give up its aspirations to join NATO, limit the size of its military capability and drop restrictions on the Russian language and the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox Church.

He has warned that he will use force to push through these demands if Kyiv refuses to accept them.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out yielding any territory that Russia has failed to take with military means.

He also refuses to accept any limits on the size of Ukraine's armed forces or restrictions on the alliances it strikes with Western partners.

The talks in Abu Dhabi are being mediated by the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor who has served as a US special envoy on several peace missions.

Ukraine's delegation will be headed by chief negotiator Rustem Umerov, who heads the country's Foreign Intelligence Service.

Other reported members of the team will be the chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Kyrylo Budanov, his deputy Sergiy Kyslytsya, and Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary faction leader of Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party.

Russia's delegation will be led by Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to President Vladimir Putin who has headed negotiations for Moscow since 2022.

Other members include deputy foreign ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin, military intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov and Yuri Zhigarlovsky, who is deputy chief of the General Staff's operational department Yuri Zhigarlovsky.

According to Ukraine's Umerov, German, British, French and Italian representatives, as well as NATO and EU officials, will hold separate talks with members of Kyiv's team.

The US's Kushner also said that he and Witkoff would meet separately with envoys from Ukraine, the EU, NATO, Germany, France, the UK and Italy to "continue the close consultation and coordination we have undertaken on European security and Ukraine's postwar future over the past several weeks."

The trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US starting on Tuesday represent a new attempt to end the more than 56-month-long conflict triggered by Moscow's 2022 invasion.

Previous talks have failed to bring any peace resolution, with Moscow making territorial demands that Kyiv has ruled out accepting.

The EU, which has been fighting for a place at the negotiating table, is sending representatives who, however, are not expected to take part in the main talks.

This comes as US President Donald Trump last week spoke of a "very big agreement" on the war involving "all of Europe," raising fears that the US wants to join with Russia in revamping European security architecture.

Read on for more on the negotiations over what is the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II.