The two days of U.S.-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi that began Tuesday are the first in nine months.
President Donald Trump has tried to project fresh optimism around them, suggesting that a major deal is close. Few experts share that optimism. The sides still seem far apart on many core issues, including on President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender its eastern Donbas region, with little sign the Russian leader is ready to end the war.
But some things are different about these talks.
A key change is that the Trump administration appears to be trying a new approach by shifting the focus onto the issue of NATO and Europe’s larger security order. The idea reportedly reflects the old negotiating adage: “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.”
For a year and a half, the fitful negotiations led by Trump’s envoys, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have been stuck. Putin’s demands are largely unchanged, including that Ukraine surrender its eastern territory, accept limits on its military and on support it can receive from European countries. U.S. attempts to entice Putin with the normalization of relations, easing sanctions and the promise of business deals have not moved him.
Hoping to move around the roadblock on territory, Witkoff and Kushner appear to be trying to broaden the talks beyond it, by opening discussions on Putin’s long-standing demands on NATO in Europe.
Ahead of this week’s talks, Kushner published lengthy posts saying they are exploring an “enduring framework for long-term European security” and for the first time key European countries are in Abu Dhabi taking part in the talks.
The new focus on European security will likely worry some European countries. Just before his invasion in 2022, Putin issued an ultimatum that called for NATO to be pulled back to its 1997 borders, meaning from Eastern European countries that the USSR dominated. It was a non-starter at the time, and it’s unlikely the U.S. believes Europe would accept that now either.
Discussing European security arrangements is likely essential to any long-term peace deal. But the trouble with the new approach is that it risks substituting one difficult negotiation on Ukrainian territory for an even longer and more difficult one on NATO in Europe. The issue with making the problem bigger is that, in trying to solve it, sometimes you just make it bigger.
As Sam Charap, a senior political analyst at the RAND Corporation, told ABC News that, while Russia is likely happy the European security order is now on the table, it also knows any negotiation on it will probably be very lengthy.
“I think they’re not blind to the reality that actually coming to agreement on these issues is going to take a long, long time,” he said. “We’re not going to have a new European security architecture agreement simultaneous to a ceasefire.”
The nine-month break since the last round of talks means there also has not been the groundwork for significant progress, Charap said.
“They’re not going to come to some radically more ambitious agreement given there hasn’t been any conversation for the past nine months,” he said.
In reality, Putin likely sees little reason to halt the war. Russia is now able to bomb Ukrainian cities with intensity not seen before, targeting civilian infrastructure and seeking to collapse the power and water supplies. Putin has again rejected a Ukrainian call for a ceasefire and is more likely to see if another winter of misery can force Ukraine to capitulate to his demands.
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