Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Abu Dhabi on Friday to tackle the vital issue of territory, with no sign of a compromise.
– Kyiv is under mounting U.S. pressure to reach a peace deal in the war triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
– Moscow demanding Kyiv cede its entire eastern industrial area of Donbas before it stops fighting.
– Zelenskiy said the territorial dispute was a central issue for the tripartite talks, including Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. officials, which were scheduled to conclude on Saturday.
– “The most important thing is that Russia should be ready to end this war, which it started,” Zelenskiy said.
– He was in regular contact with the Ukrainian negotiators, but it was too early to draw conclusions from Friday’s talks.
– “We’ll see how the conversation goes tomorrow and what the outcome will be.”
– Rustem Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council and the head of its delegation, said in a statement the talks had discussed parameters for ending the war and the “further logic of the negotiation process.”
– Zelenskiy said on Friday that a deal on U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine was ready, and that he was only waiting on Trump for a specific date and place to sign it.
– Ukraine has sought robust security guarantees from Western allies in the event of a peace deal to prevent Russia, which has shown little interest in ending the war, from invading again.
– Russia says it wants a diplomatic solution but will keep working to achieve its goals by military means as long as a negotiated solution remains elusive.
– Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the 20% it still holds of the Donetsk region of the Donbas – about 5,000 sq km (1,900 sq miles) – has proven a major stumbling block to a breakthrough deal.
– Zelenskiy refuses to give up land that Russia has not been able to capture in four years of grinding, attritional warfare. Polls show little appetite among Ukrainians for territorial concessions.
– Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia’s insistence on Ukraine yielding all of Donbas was “a very important condition.”
– Moscow considers an “Anchorage formula” – which Russia says was agreed between Trump and Putin at a summit in Alaska last August – would hand Russia control of all of Donbas and freeze the front lines elsewhere in Ukraine’s east and south.
– Russia has also floated the idea of using the bulk of nearly $5 billion of Russian assets frozen in the United States to fund a recovery of Russian-occupied territory inside Ukraine. Ukraine, backed by European allies, demands that Russia pay it reparations.