Talks between Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday show that the two sides in the war remain far apart.
Official statements reported by Reuters suggest that little of substance has emerged from the talks so far.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the US-mediated meeting as highly productive, without going into detail.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the talks as ‘constructive and quite substantive’, and said they had covered humanitarian and security issues.
The difficulty in achieving peace appears to lie primarily in the mutually exclusive expectations of the parties.
Russian forces control around a fifth of Ukraine, but territory is not the only issue at stake. Other issues include future security guarantees, which both sides say they need, and Moscow’s demand that Ukraine adopt a neutral status and not join NATO.
Trump has stepped up the pressure on Kyiv to reach an agreement, saying it is time for Ukraine to end the war or risk ‘something very bad’.
There have been no public signs that Putin is willing to drop his demand that Ukraine must surrender the entire eastern Donbas region before a peace agreement can be concluded. Zelenskyy has refused to surrender territories that his forces have sacrificed their lives to defend.
The Kremlin would prefer to discuss the future security architecture first and the war afterwards.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasised Moscow’s desire to negotiate a broad European security framework before addressing the specific details of the war.
“The idea of defining a clear framework for a future security architecture, and only then moving on to resolving the actual conflict between Russia and Ukraine, is entirely reasonable,” he said in Moscow.
Talks between the parties will continue tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine are continuing to carry out attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure.
