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Ukraine Pushes to Move Abu Dhabi Talks Earlier and Bring EU Into Negotiations
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Ukraine is seeking to move up the Ukraine-US-Russia talks in Abu Dhabi by at least a week and to bring an EU representative into the negotiations, Ukrainska Pravda reported on October 26.
The round is currently scheduled to begin around November 10, after the US midterm elections. Kyiv and Washington are trying to persuade Moscow to agree to an earlier meeting, while Russia, and at times Washington, is resisting European participation at the opening round, according to sources close to the negotiating team.
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“The Russians, by the way, do not want Europeans at the table at the first meeting,” one source told Ukrainska Pravda. “But our people will bring them and brief them there in Abu Dhabi in real time.”
The source added that the main difficulty for the Europeans is the absence of a clearly empowered representative capable of making decisions during the talks.
Kyiv considers the timing important because negotiations are expected to extend across several rounds. A source in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s team noted that every week could become increasingly important as winter deepens and Ukrainians face potential disruptions to electricity, water, and heating.
As of the evening of October 25, Moscow had not given final confirmation that it would agree to move the meeting forward, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
Ukrainian officials do not expect a breakthrough at the first round. One member of Zelenskyy’s team indicated that updated delegations may need an initial meeting to establish working relationships before more substantive negotiations begin.
“There is a feeling that the composition of the groups will change,” the source stated. “At the first meeting, the new delegations will get used to each other. At the second, substantive work will begin. And somewhere around the third, there may already be some real decisions.”
Ukraine also wants negotiations to focus first on the broader structure of a postwar settlement rather than immediately bargaining over individual villages or specific territorial lines, Ukrainska Pravda wrote.
“We need to show what this part of the world will look like after the war, how Ukraine will be protected, what cooperation with NATO will look like, or whatever else there will be,” another source explained.
Sources in Zelenskyy’s diplomatic team indicated that US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had presented the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, with the idea of discussing a new security model, which he reportedly agreed to consider.
European participation has also begun to take shape around Björn Seibert, head of cabinet and a close aide to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has emerged as a potential EU representative in recent meetings.
Ukrainian negotiator Davyd Arakhamia has also argued to US officials that any final peace arrangement must be acceptable not only at the negotiating table but to Ukrainians living in major frontline-adjacent cities such as Kharkiv and Dnipro, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
According to the source, Kyiv believes Russia still expects that pressure during the coming winter could weaken Ukraine’s negotiating position.
The talks also come as Moscow is expected to revive broader demands over Europe’s security architecture. UNITED24 Media reported that Russia may use the Abu Dhabi negotiations to press for NATO to roll back its military presence in Eastern Europe to 1997 levels, alongside demands affecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial concessions.
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