What Vladimir Putin won in Abu Dhabi Ukraine peace talks

The ambitious aim apparently now agreed between Washington and Moscow is to discuss all the issues together. And then to “find a pathway to settle them all at the same time,” Jared Kushner explained to reporters in a post-talks briefing in the UAE’s capital. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was representing the U.S. in the talks, along with Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor who is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East.

So much for sequencing — generally seen by experienced diplomatic negotiators as crucial to any successful peace talks. And so much, too, for starting with a ceasefire or the tiresome breaking down of complex issues into discrete and manageable tasks to try to move things along while raising confidence and inspiring trust.

To be sure, Russia and the United States won’t be able to strike a deal on their own. Ukraine will get a say, and European leaders have already pushed back against Trump’s big, beautiful deal, rejecting any attempt by the White House and the Kremlin to reshape the continent’s security architecture.

But it has been a longstanding Kremlin goal to get the U.S. to agree to the “let’s talk about everything” strategy, a process that will succeed in “diverting attention from what really is the critical issue, and that’s the war on Ukraine,” said Eugene Rumer, who served on the U.S. National Intelligence Council under President Barack Obama.

Rumer told reporters in a briefing that the lack of sequencing speaks volumes and is a hallmark of Russian diplomacy which aims at “muddling any situation.”

It’s difficult to quibble with his pessimism. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a long track record of using peace talks to delay, obfuscate and exhaust opponents as he continues doing whatever he wants — all the while insisting that everything is interconnected and must be solved all at the same time.

Trying to solve everything means solving nothing. But then that’s the point. “It is obvious that Putin is simply stalling for time, trying to destroy or capture Ukraine or win this war of attrition, waiting for aid to stop in Europe and for Europe to be divided,” Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi told POLITICO.

The “let’s negotiate everything together” approach has been a key part of the playbook Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have used time and again when it comes to Ukraine, and earlier in Syria. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now his country’s ambassador to London, has been warning that it is designed to exhaust and wear down opponents and was also a classic Soviet ploy.

“Putin wants Empire, Ukrainians want freedom,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador who served as a Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations during Trump’s first term, told POLITICO. “The rest is detail.” Assumptions that Putin wants peace, will negotiate seriously, or will accept a reasonable deal, “are all misguided,” he added.

Negotiations as a weapon of war can be used to distract, stall, allow time to maneuver and to ensnare the well-meaning — something that was highlighted between 2014 and 2017, when Lavrov and then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “negotiated” over Syria. The talks helped Moscow save Syria’s Bashar al-Assad from defeat, persuading then-president Obama to take his finger off the trigger and ignore his own red line on Damascus’ use of chemical weapons.

The only other top Kremlin aide as relentless as Lavrov in this technique of exhaustive obfuscation is Putin’s favorite “historian,” Vladimir Medinsky, who served as an arch-patriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020. An advocate of putting up statues of Joseph Stalin, he has led the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine stretching back to Istanbul in 2025. There he invoked the Great Northern War of 1700-21 as a warning that Russia is ready to fight Ukraine for as long as it takes to win. Medinsky again led the Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi.

In fact, Moscow’s red lines have not shifted one iota in the years since Putin launched his full-scale invasion. The Russian leader and his top aides have emphatically outlined them for years — conditions that would, in effect, rip the nation of Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees that Kyiv will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, with severe limitations placed on stockpiles of weapons and the size of its army. Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern regions it claims as part of the Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such.

And until then — as Medinsky has bragged — Russia will continue to wage war.