Abu Dhabi talks put Europe’s security, not just Ukraine’s, on the table

ABU DHABI (The Thursday Times) — For two days this week, American, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators sat around a long table in Abu Dhabi beneath portraits of the Emirati leadership. It was the first three-way meeting between them since February, and the agenda had grown. Alongside prisoners and front lines, the talks now cover the security order of Europe itself. That makes them bigger and, in some ways, harder. It also confirms something Pakistan has its own reasons to notice: the rooms where wars are negotiated have moved south and east.

Who is at the table

The United States is represented by its peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The top American and Nato commander in Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, is also taking part. Russia’s team is led by Vladimir Medinsky, the presidential aide who headed Moscow’s negotiators in 2022 and again in 2025. It includes the senior diplomat Sergei Ryabkov, a figure closely associated with the demand Moscow made weeks before the 2022 invasion that Nato pull its forces back from eastern Europe. His presence is a signal that Russia wants that old argument reopened.

Ukraine’s delegation is led by Rustem Umerov, now head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, with Kyrylo Budanov, who runs the President’s Office, his first deputy Serhii Kyslytsia, the parliamentary leader of the ruling party David Arakhamia, and Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of military intelligence. National security advisers from France, Germany, Britain and Italy, along with Nato and European Union officials, flew in for separate meetings with the Ukrainians and Americans. Russia refused to meet them. “Well, they flew to Abu Dhabi. Let them sit there,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The road here was long. The three sides met twice in Abu Dhabi and once in Geneva earlier this year, then stopped after the United States and Israel went to war with Iran on February 28. The process restarted after Mr Trump met Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy of President Vladimir Putin, privately at the White House on November 5, and Mr Witkoff announced that the talks would cover “post-war security arrangements, de-escalation, humanitarian efforts, and next steps toward peace”.

What is on the table

The easiest issue is people. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the first day had produced talk of a large prisoner exchange. “They want to do 1,000 for 1,000, maybe 1,500 for 1,500. Some kind of large-scale exchange. The Americans will go to Russia with this agenda,” he told reporters in Copenhagen. Asked whether this round could end differently from earlier ones, he answered: “We don’t trust, but we hope.”

The harder issue is what keeps the peace once the guns stop. Ukraine has asked Western allies to pay for an army of 800,000 troops for at least ten years after the war, according to a senior Ukrainian official. Russia has always wanted the opposite. In 2022 it proposed capping Ukraine’s forces at 85,000, when Kyiv offered 250,000, and at talks in Istanbul in June 2025 it again demanded limits on Ukraine’s army and weapons, along with neutrality and a Ukrainian withdrawal from four regions.

Washington now wants to settle the war and Europe’s wider security together. Mr Kushner told the delegates that the United States had “narrowed the gaps” and hoped to “create a new framework” for Ukraine, Russia and Europe that would secure “decades, if not centuries, of peace”. A source in the Russian delegation said ending the war was “merely one item on the agenda” and that Moscow’s main aim was a review of security “for the entire continent”. Ukraine has warned against a “Yalta 2.0A reference to the 1945 Yalta conference, where the US, Britain and the Soviet Union shaped post-war Europe, leaving the east under Soviet control. Used as shorthand for big powers deciding the fate of smaller ones.”, and the EU says such arrangements can only be discussed after a ceasefire.

Then there is land. Russia still demands the whole of the DonbasUkraine’s eastern industrial region, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia claims both but does not control all of their territory., including about 5,180 square kilometres in Donetsk and Luhansk that its forces have not captured. An American idea, reported this week, to redraw the two regions’ administrative boundaries along the front line, letting Moscow claim the Donbas while Ukraine kept its cities, was rejected in Kyiv. “Ukraine will never recognise it, neither de facto nor de jure,” a Ukrainian source said. Mr Zelensky said the Russians had raised territory but that such questions belonged at the level of leaders, and accused them of overstating how much of the Donbas they hold. A senior American official said territorial arrangements could not be settled before Ukraine’s security guarantees were.

Nor is there agreement on stopping the fighting first. Mr Lavrov has ruled out an immediate ceasefire, accusing Europeans of wanting a pause to move troops into Ukraine. “Kiev proposes a ceasefire to begin with. For Moscow, a ceasefire must become part of the terms of a final settlement,” said Vadim Kozyulin of the Russian Diplomatic Academy. The foreign ministers of Ukraine and France, meeting in Paris, praised American efforts to secure “partial truces” as a first step. The model is the six-day truce around Oleshky in Kherson, the longest of the war. It also shows the limits: on the day it ended, November 2, Russian bombs hit a school used to hand out aid in the village of Komyshuvakha, killing at least 26 people.

Why Abu Dhabi

The United Arab Emirates has earned its seat by doing quiet, repetitive work. Its foreign ministry said in October that a 540-person exchange, 270 from each side, was the 27th it had brokered between Russia and Ukraine, bringing the total number of captives released through Emirati mediation to 8,537. Few other governments can phone both the Kremlin and Kyiv and expect an answer, and fewer still have also kept the trust of the White House.

“Abu Dhabi’s hosting of the US-Russian-Ukrainian negotiations reflects the UAE’s standing and its constructive role in facilitating dialogue and bridging differences,” said Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed. “We are optimistic that these talks will achieve a positive breakthrough.”

There was an irony in the timing. On the first day of talks, a vessel operated by ADNOC was damaged in an attack inside UAE waters, one of a string of strikes on shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz. The Emirates was hosting the diplomacy of one war while living with the consequences of another.

The Gulf as the world’s negotiating room

Abu Dhabi is not alone. In February 2025, American and Russian officials held their first high-level talks of the second Trump term in Riyadh. A month later the Americans and Ukrainians met in Jeddah. Qatar has negotiated the return of Ukrainian children from Russia, has spent years as a go-between on Gaza, and its prime minister was at the White House on Monday as a mediator on the Iran war. Türkiye, on the region’s edge, hosted direct Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul last year.

The reasons are practical. The Gulf states have money to underwrite deals, working relations with Moscow that Western capitals no longer have, close ties with Washington, secure venues and a habit of discretion. They also want the standing that comes from being useful to great powers. The Iran war has tested one part of the pitch: these capitals can no longer claim to sit at a safe distance from conflict.

Pakistan has played the same role on a different file. In June, after weeks of shuttle diplomacy, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding as mediator once President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had endorsed it. That made Islamabad the recognised channel between Washington and Tehran, not just a host. The lesson from both cases is that mediation rests on the same few things: relationships on both sides, credibility, discretion and the patience to keep a channel open when the news is bad.

What it means for Pakistan

Pakistan has no seat in Abu Dhabi and has consistently called for dialogue and diplomacy to end the war. It still has a stake in how it ends. The first is economic. Pakistan has bought Russian crude and wheat in recent years and pays world prices for most of its fuel and much of its food. Any settlement that eases sanctions on Russian energy or restores safe shipping in the Black Sea would add supply to markets that are tight while the Strait of Hormuz stays largely closed.

The second is principle. A peace that redraws borders by force, or that lets large powers settle the security of smaller ones over their heads, sets precedents that travel. Pakistan, which has long argued that disputes should be settled by the will of the people concerned and by international law rather than by facts on the ground, has reason to watch how the territorial question is handled.

The third is reputational. Every successful round in a Gulf capital adds to the market for trusted intermediaries. Islamabad showed in June that it can be one. Keeping that standing will depend on the same quiet consistency the Emirates has shown with its 27 exchanges.

What to watch

Four things will show whether this round mattered. The first is whether the prisoner exchange happens, and at what scale, once the Americans take the proposal to Moscow. The second is whether the parties agree to more local truces of the kind tried in Kherson. The third is whether Europe gets a formal seat; Mr Zelensky has urged European governments to name their representatives by the end of the month. The fourth is whether the conversation about a “new framework” for Europe produces guarantees Ukraine can rely on, or becomes a bargain struck above its head.

None of these will be settled in two days. But the talks have moved from whether to talk to what a settlement might contain. For a war in its fifth year, that is something, and the host deserves some of the credit.