US, Russia and Ukraine Open Abu Dhabi Talks on Ending the War
Delegations from the United States, Russia and Ukraine began three-way talks in Abu Dhabi on 10 November 2026, with the stated aim of ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. The talks are scheduled to last two days. According to The Guardian's live coverage, they are the first substantive talks aimed at ending the war since February 2026.
The US side is to be led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump. Ukraine's delegation is led by Rustem Umerov, the head of its foreign intelligence service.
Europe is largely on the sidelines of the formal sessions. Officials from France, Germany and the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, will not take part directly in the negotiations, which Russia has insisted on. On the morning of 10 November, US envoys met Ukrainian and European officials in Abu Dhabi ahead of the trilateral meeting.
The two sides start from far apart. Ukraine wants Russian forces pushed back to the original border between the two countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Moscow to gain control of all of the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine.
Security guarantees for Ukraine are a central topic. These are commitments from outside countries to protect Ukraine against future attack, and the discussions include the possibility of protection modelled on Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the alliance's mutual defence clause under which an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all.
On the eve of the talks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian battlefield successes were strengthening Kyiv's negotiating position. Trump said the United States was seeing a "very strong inclination" towards ending Russia's war, and that both sides were "tired of fighting."
The talks are the latest attempt to find a diplomatic route out of a war that has lasted since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whether they produce an agreement, and what form any agreement would take, was not settled as the meeting opened.
