After just three hours, Russia, Ukraine and the United States declared themselves done with the latest round of peace talks on Thursday, offering scant sign of progress toward ending a war that is grinding toward a fifth year despite the Trump administration’s diplomatic interventions.
A familiar pattern played out as two days of negotiations wrapped up in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Everyone said the talks were productive. More talks were planned. Yet with little to show for them but an announced exchange of prisoners of war, the major sticking points in any peace deal appeared a long ways from being unstuck.
Officials did not say what was discussed behind closed doors. A louder message came a day before the talks, when Russia unleashed another huge attack on Ukraine’s power grid during a frigid winter.
The delegations in Abu Dhabi had been expected to focus on the two main obstacles to a peace deal: the fate of Ukrainian-controlled territory in the east and guarantees over Ukraine’s postwar security.
Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of staff for President Volodymyr Zelensky and a member of Ukraine’s negotiating team, told a Ukrainian news outlet that the talks were “really constructive.” He spent more time praising the Emirates and the United States, however, “for the high-quality organization and mediation.”
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, tried to cast the results of the talks in a positive light, saying that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to swap 314 prisoners. But this represented no particular breakthrough in diplomatic efforts that have stretched on for months, long past Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to end the war in 24 hours. Ukraine and Russia have regularly exchanged prisoners of war and the remains of the dead for years.
“This outcome was achieved from peace talks that have been detailed and productive,” Mr. Witkoff said on social media. He added: “While significant work remains, steps like this demonstrate that sustained diplomatic engagement is delivering tangible results and advancing efforts to end the war in Ukraine.”
Mr. Witkoff said the trilateral discussions, first held over two days last month, would continue “with additional progress anticipated in the coming weeks.”
Within a few hours, Russia and Ukraine traded 157 prisoners, the first swap since early October. It was unclear if this exchange was related to the peace talks, as prisoner releases usually take days or even weeks to arrange. The U.S. European Command also announced that because of the talks, the U.S. armed forces would resume high-level military dialogue with Russia.
Getting Moscow to budge on any of the major hurdles in the peace talks is a far more difficult challenge, analysts say. Russia believes it is winning on the battlefield and has no need to compromise, analysts say, despite its huge losses of troops and glacial territorial gains.
Russia now controls about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. While the Russian Army’s progress has been grinding, it picked up somewhat in the final months of last year.
Publicly, the Kremlin has so far not stepped back from the aims it laid out when it launched its full-scale invasion almost four years ago. It wants all of an eastern area known as the Donbas, comprised mostly of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, even though Ukraine still holds onto about 20 percent of Donetsk.
On Thursday, the Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi doubled down on this goal. The state-run news agency Tass said Russia did not just want Ukraine to surrender all of the Donbas as part of any deal. Negotiators, it reported, also insisted on the recognition of the Donbas as Russian territory by all other countries.
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed reporting.
Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.
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