At his speech in Davos, Switzerland, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine was caught in an endless Groundhog Day as Europe’s largest conflict since World War II is about to complete four years, but Russian rhetoric after President Vladimir Putin’s overnight talks with U.S. envoys offered little hope that the punishing cycle will end any time soon.
Top Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said after the meeting that Russia would keep fighting until it gets the territory it wants, continuing to cleave to the Kremlin’s maximalist conditions for peace. President Donald Trump had sent envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to the midnight Moscow meeting.
Even as negotiators from the United States, Ukraine and Russia prepare for new rounds of trilateral talks in the United Arab Emirates beginning Friday, Russia has ruled out any shift on territory, despite months of negotiations between Ukraine and the United States and emerging consensus that territory is the final issue to resolve.
The UAE meetings mark the first time all three nations have participated in joint peace talks, a step meant to move the process forward but one that could bog down into lengthy talks as fighting drags on.
The peace process presided over by Trump has long resembled its own grinding Groundhog Day, with the United States, Ukraine and Europe hammering out agreements and Kyiv making compromises, only to be rebuffed by Putin, who analysts say is not interested in a peace deal that preserves Ukrainian sovereignty.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted Friday that Ukraine must surrender the land Moscow has failed to occupy in the eastern area of Donbas, a strategic, heavily fortified band of Ukrainian territory, that remains under Kyiv’s control.
“Russia’s position is well known: Ukraine, the Ukrainian armed forces, must leave the territory of Donbas and be withdrawn from there. This is a very important condition,” Peskov said Friday, while indicating other areas of disagreement remained. “There are also other conditions that remain on the agenda of the negotiations.”
Witkoff had said Thursday in Davos that there was only one remaining area unresolved.
Ushakov described the overnight talks as “substantive, constructive and very frank” but insisted that Putin and Trump had agreed to a “formula” dividing Ukrainian territory when the two met in Alaska in August — and that there would be no peace except on that basis. Peskov declined to comment on the details of the formula.
There has never been clarity about any such formula, and there have since been significant negotiations involving Ukraine, Europe and the United States. After the August summit, Trump said talks had made “some great progress” but that “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” Later, he added, “We didn’t get there.”
After the August summit Putin claimed to have reached “an understanding” with Trump, without offering details. Friday marked the first time that Russia had used the term “formula” to refer to the understandings Russia said came out of the August discussion. In his briefing in the early hours of Friday, Ushakov said that Russia would continue the war unless the “formula” was implemented.
On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the “understandings” reached in Anchorage were proposed by the United States and accepted by Moscow.
“We still hope these understandings remain fully valid, though we observe how hysterically Europe and Zelensky, along with his team, are attempting to dissuade the U.S. from this stance and reimpose their own concepts,” he said.
In comments to journalists on Air Force One, Trump insisted that Putin would compromise, reinforcing his belief that Putin wants peace and is ready to make a deal — despite the Kremlin’s apparent inflexibility.
He said he had a “good meeting” with Zelensky on Thursday but was vague when asked what concessions Putin would have to make to seal a deal.
“At this point, he’ll make concessions. Everybody’s making concessions to get it done,” Trump said.
Russia has ramped up attacks on civilian targets across Ukraine, notably this winter, pounding its power grid, destroying electrical infrastructure and leaving swaths of Ukraine without power, heating or water.
Russia expert Fiona Hill, chancellor of Durham University in England and Russia adviser during Trump’s first term, said in a recent podcast that Putin was committed to his goals in Ukraine and could keep the war economy going for some time, despite the mounting deficit and declining oil revenue.
“He’s not really thinking of a period when peace breaks out. He’s become a wartime president, and I think he feels that he can keep a wartime economy ticking along for quite some time and maybe put off, then, the kinds of problems that he will inevitably face,” Hill said.
She said Putin was betting that he could eventually exhaust Ukraine and its European allies, and that, “he will have the ability to basically press this to a final conclusion that, despite all the losses, all the incredibly high costs — and he is ruthless, and he’s prepared to pay that price — everybody else will fold. That’s his bet.”
Despite Witkoff’s optimism at Davos, Russia analyst Tatiana Stanovaya wrote in comments on X on Thursday that the Russian and U.S. positions on a Ukrainian peace deal remained “strikingly far apart.”
Putin, she said, was less concerned about territorial gains but was determined to ensure Russia’s future dominance over Ukraine, which the Kremlin refers to as an “anti-Russia.”
“In recent weeks, senior Russian officials have become increasingly explicit in stating that the objective is regime change,” she said. “That aim is reflected in Russia’s political demands to Ukraine. Again, this is not about territory — it is about all of Ukraine, not through physical control, but through institutions.”
She cited comments by Lavrov at a news conference Tuesday in which he said that any deal that preserved what he described as the “Nazi regime” in Ukraine “is naturally completely unacceptable to us.” Lavrov and other top Russian officials have referred to Zelensky and members of his administration as a “Nazi regime,” attempting to link Russia’s war against Ukraine with the World War II fight against the German Nazi government.
Stanovaya added that Russia has succeeded over the past year in rebuffing a deal while minimizing the damage to its relations with the Trump administration. She has long argued that Putin has been at pains to demonstrate that Russia is eager for a peace deal, while persuading Trump to drop his pressure for a ceasefire, enabling Moscow to fight on even as peace negotiations take place.
Trump has often focused on the mounting casualties in the war on both sides, and he said Thursday, “I believe they’re at a point now where they can come together and get a deal done. And if they don’t, they’re stupid.”
“The one thing that Putin clearly doesn’t care about is human capital,” said Hill in the podcast, “and this is why I think President Trump just doesn’t get Putin at all. He cannot understand why you would slaughter all of these people that you actually need to make your economy work.”
Ushakov said the head of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU, Igor Kostyukov, would head Moscow’s team at the trilateral talks in the UAE, while envoy Kirill Dmitriev would meet Witkoff separately to discuss economic cooperation between Russia and the United States.
Ukraine’s delegation will include National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov, Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov, and the head of Zelensky’s parliamentary faction leader David Arakhamia.
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