KYIV — Ukraine’s top diplomat cited “progress” in the latest round of talks with Russia held in the United Arab Emirates, saying that Moscow had sent more serious negotiators this time around. The talks, which include the United States, are set to resume Sunday.
On Tuesday, however, Russia’s daily onslaught Ukraine included an attack on a passenger train, killing at least five people — a rare occurrence in the four-year-old conflict. Ukraine is also hoping to soon nail down U.S. security guarantees before it tackles some of the thornier issues in the negotiations.
Ukrainian and many Western officials are still highly skeptical that Moscow is serious about ending the conflict, which will mark its fourth anniversary next month — especially as Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and sacrifice tens of thousands of soldiers every month to eke out minimal gains along the front line.
But Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha — echoing other officials — said in an interview published in the Ukrainian media late Tuesday that the improvement in the talks could in part be credited to “a qualitative change in the composition of the Russian delegation,” which included members of the military and intelligence services.
“These are different people, and there were no more pseudo-historical lectures. The talks were very focused,” he said. Previous Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul were dismissed by Kyiv as time-wasting exercises with low-level mediators.
Still, he said that the “most sensitive issues” were still under contention — namely, who would control Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.
He added that Ukraine was ready to sign a treaty for security guarantees with the United States that would have to be ratified by the U.S. Congress so that it is “legally binding in nature.”
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also encountered difficulties in persuading Trump to sign such an agreement.
On Sunday, during a trip to Lithuania, Zelensky said that the document was “100 percent ready” and that Kyiv was “waiting for our partners to confirm the date and place when we will sign it.”
However, in a report published Tuesday in the Financial Times, officials involved in the talks said that Trump was pressuring Ukraine to concede territory before he would agree to signing the security agreement.
Washington denied it was strong-arming Kyiv. A senior U.S. official, following the meetings in Abu Dhabi, said that “President Trump is very open to giving [a security guarantee], but obviously it will depend on what the final arrangements are on a full deal.”
Sybiha also said that Zelensky was ready to meet the Russian leader Vladimir Putin to resolve these issues. “However, the obstacle in the peace process is, and will remain going forward, Russia,” he said.
On Wednesday, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said that Putin was ready to meet Zelensky in Moscow, for which “the Russian Federation is ready to guarantee his safety.”
For their part, Russian officials expressed a degree of optimism over the talks.
“Overall, the fact that a whole range of complex issues related to the settlement are being discussed at the expert level can already be considered progress, the beginning of such a dialogue. Further developments will depend on the constructiveness of the interlocutors,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday in reference to the Abu Dhabi meetings.
Meanwhile, three drones bombarded a train traveling in the eastern Kharkiv region late Tuesday, with one of the drones striking a passenger carriage directly, local officials said. It was a further escalation of Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s civilian population this winter, in which Moscow’s drones and missiles have targeted the country’s energy system, plunging hundreds of thousands into cold and darkness.
In a social media post Tuesday that included a short video showing the damage and the carriage engulfed in flames, Zelensky said, “There is … no military justification for killing civilians in a train carriage,” adding that “more than 200 people were on the train, and 18 were in the carriage.”
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, and John Hudson in Washington contributed to this report.
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