Source : Reuters
ABU DHABI, November 11, 2026 – Two days of talks in Abu Dhabi between Russian, Ukrainian and US delegations ended on Wednesday without a breakthrough on ending the war, though both sides confirmed that a large-scale prisoner exchange was being prepared, and US envoys said they would take the discussions to President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking in Copenhagen on Tuesday as the talks opened, said he was “happy” with a change in the approach taken by US mediators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Asked about those changes, he said: “I see changes. I’m very happy with what I hear.” He described the first day’s discussions as “constructive and quite substantive” and said humanitarian issues, security guarantees and a large-scale prisoner exchange were among the topics, according to Agence France-Presse, carried by Asharq Al-Awsat. BRICS News, posting on X, rendered his remarks as a statement that “political changes could open the door to negotiations with Russia.” The fuller quotations from Copenhagen refer to a change in the US approach at talks that were already under way.
After the second day, Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said mutual understanding had been reached on some issues but not on others, and that more talks would follow, Reuters reported. A new potential European security framework had been a central theme, he said. “Together with the American side, we exchanged our views on this; on some points we reached a common understanding, whilst on others we did not,” Medinsky said in remarks broadcast on Russian state television. He was cool on a role for the European Union for now, saying Russia had “not received a single peace initiative or a single concrete peace proposal from European countries, so it is unclear what there is to discuss.”
Kushner and Witkoff are to meet Putin in Moscow on Thursday and then travel to Dublin to see Zelenskiy, the BBC, Reuters and Axios reported. Axios, citing a US official, said the envoys would reiterate a request that Russia submit a new proposal for a future security arrangement with Europe, and would also ask Putin to allow European representatives to join the next round of talks. Kushner said at a news conference that the talks had been “pretty tough.” Ukrainian negotiator Davyd Arakhamia called the round “one of the hardest” but said he felt “good momentum,” the BBC reported.
The parties agreed on a prisoner swap that Kushner and Arakhamia said could be the largest since the war began, Axios reported. The exact numbers were to be decided in the Thursday meetings with Putin and Zelenskiy. Before and after the Abu Dhabi sessions, US and Ukrainian teams briefed diplomats from Germany, Britain, France, Italy, the European Union and NATO. Moscow has so far been unwilling to allow Europeans into the talks. Medinsky said he did not understand “what can be discussed with them,” Axios reported, while also saying Russia wanted a broader security deal with Europe as part of an agreement to end the war.
The territorial dispute over Donetsk remains the main obstacle. Medinsky said “every inch” of land would be “returned to Russia one way or another,” the BBC reported. Kyiv wants to freeze the contact line. Kushner said any peacetime security framework depended on the war ending, and that this could not happen “until there’s an agreement on territory and on all other bilateral issues.”
The meetings were the first with US mediators present since talks were suspended in February.
Source: Reuters, BBC, Axios and Agence France-Presse; BRICS News’s X
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