Russia and Ukraine sat down in the same room again on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, for the first time in nine months. The setting was Abu Dhabi. The format was familiar by now — American mediators in the middle, Russian and Ukrainian delegations across from each other — and the mood, at least in public, was warmer than the last time they tried this.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the first day “constructive and quite substantive”. That’s not the language of a breakthrough. It’s the language of a meeting that didn’t fall apart. After nearly five years of war, that counts for something.
Day one: what actually got said
The American side came in with two heavyweights. US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, are leading the effort to broker a settlement. Kushner opened the session by saying 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,” he said.
Big words. Kushner also told reporters he believed there were “some good ideas how to bridge” the differences between the two sides. That kind of optimism has been heard before in this war, and it has usually faded fast. Still, the fact that both delegations stayed in the room for more than four hours on the first day suggests neither side walked in looking for an excuse to leave.
Rustem Umerov, who heads Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service and leads Kyiv’s delegation, thanked the United States for its efforts. “Our people are waiting to end this war. And we hope that we will achieve the lasting peace for Ukraine,” he said.
On the Russian side, the delegation is led by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky, who noted at the start that his team “has become bigger and more professional”. He said he hoped 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”. Medinsky’s team includes GRU military intelligence chief Igor Kostyukov and senior military officers — a sign Moscow is treating this round seriously, at least in terms of who it sent.
Zelenskyy also described the negotiations as a “special moment”. He had spent the day before in Berlin, meeting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, where he said he hoped the Abu Dhabi talks could open the way to a three-way leaders’ meeting that includes Russian President Vladimir Putin. That is still a long way off.
The territory problem nobody wants to blink on
Strip away the polite opening statements and the talks come down to one brutal question: land.
Russia controls roughly 20 percent of Ukraine, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region. Moscow wants all of the Donbas. Kyiv wants the front line frozen where it is, holding on to territory it sees as vital to its own defence. Those positions are not close. They haven’t been close at any point in this war.
A US official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity before the talks, said both Moscow and Kyiv had privately shown some flexibility on territory. That’s the kind of claim that is impossible to check from the outside — and it is worth treating carefully. Publicly, neither side has moved an inch.
Security guarantees for Ukraine were also central on day one, the official said, including a possible defence commitment modelled on Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty — a promise that an attack on Ukraine triggers a collective response. Any territorial agreement, the official added, would most likely come at the end of the negotiations, once a post-war security framework had been settled. The hardest part comes last.
Ilya Timtchenko, a fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, urged caution. Each side is likely to lay out its positions, he told Al Jazeera, but “you’re not really going to be seeing any deal”. He also pointed to a clock ticking in Washington: the new US Congress, elected in the midterm elections earlier this month, is about to take its seats, and the Trump administration will be pushing for something before that changes the political picture.
Europe is in the room next door, not the main one
One of the sharpest tensions around these talks isn’t between Russia and Ukraine. It’s between the Europeans and everyone else.
Before the main meeting started, the Ukrainian delegation met separately with representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, NATO and the European Commission, along with the two US envoys. The Europeans want a seat at the table. They have been saying so for months. France has argued there can be no lasting peace in Ukraine without addressing European security, and that this requires European involvement.
Russia has made clear it does not see a place for Europeans at the main meeting. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the negotiations were agreed as a strictly three-way format, and Europeans would not take part directly.
Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven leading industrialised nations met in Paris on Tuesday, with the wars in Ukraine and Iran dominating their discussions. There was no unified decision on either conflict, according to Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the French capital, who reported that the US is “in some ways at the moment is an outlier on a lot of … policies that the Europeans specifically want on Ukraine”.
A long road with a familiar pattern
This is the third round of talks in Abu Dhabi this year, following security consultations in January and February. The last trilateral meeting before this one was held in Geneva on 18 February and ended without a breakthrough. No round so far has come close to one. Trump, who promised to end the war quickly when he took office in January 2025, told reporters he saw a “very strong inclination” towards ending it and that both sides were “tired of fighting”.
What happens next
Day two of the talks takes place on Wednesday, 11 November, in Abu Dhabi. After that, the delegations will report back to their capitals, and the real test begins: whether anything said in that conference room survives contact with the politics back home.
Sources: Al Jazeera; Reuters; BBC; The National.
