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High Hurdles To Progress At New US-Ukraine-Russia Talks
After fading into the background when the war with Iran began, the US diplomatic push to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is intensifying again, with the first US-Ukraine-Russia talks since February scheduled for November 10-11 in Abu Dhabi.
On the eve of the talks, US President Donald Trump said on the CBS program 60 Minutes that he believes “we’re very close to a deal” and that the war is “going to end soon.”
Nevertheless, expectations of a breakthrough at the negotiations this week are low. Here are five reasons why.
Means To An End
One of the barriers to substantial progress could be summed up in a single word: Russia.
While the statement that Russia could end the war in an instant is something of a truism, it’s also true: President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and he could halt the fighting, at least, by agreeing to something Kyiv and the West have called for: a cease-fire that would leave the front lines in place.
But he has shown no sign of doing so, and analysts caution that Moscow has used past talks to play for time and keep hopes for peace alive while refusing to make concessions.
“For the West, negotiations are a means of ending the war; for Putin, they are potentially a means of winning it,” Sam Greene, a professor at the Russia Institute at King's College London and author of a book on Putin, wrote in a blog post on November 8.
Western policymakers need to understand “the distinction between Putin wanting negotiations and Putin wanting to negotiate,” he wrote.
The Donbas
In launching the full-scale invasion, Putin aimed to subjugate Ukraine and weaken the West, and experts say his desire to seize territory is secondary to those goals. But going into the Abu Dhabi talks, one of the highest hurdles to progress is a chunk of territory in the Donetsk region -- part of the Donbas -- that Moscow’s forces have failed to capture in years of extremely bloody fighting.
The Kremlin says Russian control over all of the Donbas is a prerequisite for any peace deal, not the subject of negotiation, and that it will continue its efforts to take the remaining portion by force if diplomacy doesn’t deliver it into Moscow’s hands.
Trump seemed to suggest that such a result is in the cards when he told CBS that the war would end “with a little bit different shape Ukraine,” though he did not specify what part of the country Kyiv might have to cede or whether he meant Moscow’s control would be formalized -- something Kyiv says is unacceptable. Russia now holds about 20 percent of Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula, which it occupied in 2014.
As for the Donbas, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Russia must not be handed territory that Kyiv’s forces have been able to defend, and there’s no sign of a change in that stance.
Adding to Kyiv’s motivation is the fact that the portion of the Donetsk region that Ukraine still holds is a “fortress belt” of defensive infrastructure, and relinquishing it would leave Ukraine more vulnerable to future attacks.
'Big, Beautiful Agreement'
Trump has been seeking to broker a peace deal since he started his current term in January 2025, after repeatedly saying he could end the war in a day or two. At times, the US has sought a full cease-fire as an initial step -- an idea that Russia has consistently rejected, saying the fighting can stop when a comprehensive peace deal is reached.
On November 5, however, Trump suggested something much broader: a “big, beautiful agreement” that is “going to involve more than Ukraine.”
His son-in-law and special adviser Jared Kushner, who is to represent the US in Abu Dhabi along with Steve Witkoff, elaborated on the idea in an X post, writing of “the need for a broader European security architecture that can help establish conditions for lasting peace.”
Kushner offered assurances that any new arrangements “must fully respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independent decision-making of every nation. Each country will retain authority over its own security and alliances, and no country would have a veto over another’s sovereign choices.”
In a new X post on November 9, Kushner said that before the trilateral talks, he and Witkoff would "meet with our partners from Ukraine, the EU, NATO, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy to continue the close consultation and coordination we have undertaken on European security and Ukraine’s postwar future."
He wrote that "achieving a comprehensive and lasting settlement will also require direct engagement between Russia and our European partners on the broader security arrangements that affect them. "
But the remarks from Trump and Kushner rang alarm bells in Kyiv and beyond, in part because some of the language echoed longstanding Kremlin calls for a strong say for Russia on European security architecture decades after the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe and the collapse of the USSR.
It raised concerns that Europe -- which will not be directly involved in the trilateral talks -- could be left out of discussions on its own future.
"We already have a European security architecture in place," EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters on November 6, adding, “Any agreement in order to be implemented will require the European Union to be part of it."
On November 9, Kallas said Russia has been "bombing civilians" and "pretending to negotiate," adding that "we haven't seen any goodwill from the Russian side."
In any case, Ukraine and the EU will be wary of any discussions that threaten to exclude Europe or leapfrog over what they see as more urgent goals, such as ending the fighting and ensuring Ukraine’s security. And a push for a continent-spanning agreement could make smaller steps toward peace harder to achieve.
Winter War
The talks come one week after US voters handed Trump’s party a huge defeat in the midterm elections, with Democrats wresting control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives from Republicans.
The new Congress will not be seated until January 3, though, leaving a window of several weeks in which the White House may want to seal a deal.
Reaching an agreement would mean that something’s got to give, though. Trump may have hinted at what that could be, in his view, by suggesting that Ukraine will have to cede territory.
But the power of the US to press Kyiv to make major concessions is limited, and the imminent change in Washington -- as well as successes on the battlefield and in its campaign of strikes on Russian energy and military infrastructure -- may be incentives for Ukraine to endure what could be its harshest winter yet.
Meanwhile, major new pressure on Russia seems unlikely for now, and analysts said Moscow is likely to continue its relentless attacks on Ukrainian power plants and other vital infrastructure -- as well as strikes that kill civilians -- over the winter in the hope of pushing Kyiv toward compromises in 2027.
“I certainly don’t think we’re going to have peace before spring,” British-based analyst and author Mark Galeotti said on his podcast late last month. “If nothing else, Putin will think, ‘Let’s have another winter hammering the Ukrainians.’”
Greene, in his blog, wrote that Russia will be counting on inflicting a “calamitous” winter on Ukrainians and looking to elections next spring in France and Germany will undermine European support for Kyiv.
By May or June, “Moscow will likely feel that its position is at a high-water mark and will look to lock in its gains,” he wrote, adding that as for this week’s talks, “My baseline assumption…is that Abu Dhabi will yield nothing of substance.”
Horrible History
For suggestions that Russia is not ready to make concessions, one need look no further than statements from Putin and other officials to that effect.
Another possible piece of evidence, however, is the fact that Moscow’s delegation at the talks is to be led by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky, a historian and former culture minister who has both shared and shaped Putin’s views about Ukraine, which the Russian president has repeatedly said has no right to full sovereignty.
Medinsky, who has echoed Putin’s revisionism on Ukrainian history and other matters, is widely reported to have been instrumental in writing a July 2021 article that, at least in retrospect, laid bare Putin’s designs on Ukraine seven months before the full-scale invasion.
He led Moscow’s delegation at some of the previous rounds of talks with Ukraine in the past two years, including the most recent trilateral meeting, in Geneva in February, and was seen in Kyiv and the West as a conduit for the repetition of Russian demands, showing little flexibility at talks that ended without progress toward peace.
"You want serious negotiations, you send serious people," Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned in protest at the Ukraine invasion and lives abroad, told RFE/RL in 2025. "Medinsky? He's amateur team, second, third tier, not to be taken seriously."
