KYIV: Ukrainian and Russian negotiators will tackle the vital issue of territory during two days of talks in Abu Dhabi starting on Friday, each side said, with no sign of a softening of their positions to end the four-year war.
Ukraine is under mounting US pressure to reach a peace deal in the war triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, with Moscow demanding Kyiv cede its entire eastern industrial area of Donbas before it stops fighting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the territorial dispute would be a top priority of the next round of talks in the United Arab Emirates.
“The question of Donbas is key. It will be discussed how the three sides…, see this in Abu Dhabi today and tomorrow,” he said, responding to questions in a WhatsApp media chat a day after talks with US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos that both leaders described as positive.
The talks in the Gulf were due to begin on Friday evening, a Zelensky aide said, and resume on Saturday morning.
No sign of compromise as Zelensky terms Donbas dispute ‘key question’
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the 20pc it still holds of the Donetsk region of the Donbas — about 5,000-sq-km has proven a major stumbling block to a breakthrough deal.
Zelensky refuses to give up land that Russia has not been able to capture in four years of grinding, attritional warfare.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia’s insistence on Ukraine yielding the Donbas was “a very important condition”.
A source close to the Kremlin said Moscow considers a so-called “Anchorage formula”, which Moscow said was agreed between Trump and Putin at a summit last August, to mean Russia controlling all of Donbas and freezing the current front lines elsewhere in Ukraine’s east and south.
In Davos, Zelensky said the Abu Dhabi talks would be the first trilateral meetings involving Ukrainian and Russian envoys and US mediators since the war began.
Russian Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of Russia’s military intelligence agency, was heading Moscow’s team in Abu Dhabi. Ukraine’s delegation was to be led by Rustem Umerov, secretary of Kyiv’s National Security and Defence Council.
Zelensky also told reporters that a deal on US security guarantees for Kyiv 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.
For its part, Russia has 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.
Asked about Russia’s idea, Zelensky dismissed it as “nonsense”.
Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2026
