Russia-Ukraine war: second round of peace talks opens in Abu Dhabi

By Muhammad MubashirPublished On 04 Feb 2026

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have begun a second round of United States-brokered talks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as they seek to advance fraught talks on how to end Russia’s nearly four-year war in Ukraine.

The Russian and the Ukrainian delegations arrived in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday morning, according to Russian state media and spokesperson of Ukrainian chief negotiator. It remained unclear when the US delegation would be arriving.

“Another round of negotiations has begun in Abu Dhabi,” Rustem Umerov, head of the Ukrainian delegation, wrote on social media, adding Kyiv’s team was seeking “to achieve a just and lasting peace.”

The two-day trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of violating the Trump-brokered deal that called for ceasing attacks on energy facilities.

A huge Russian drone and missile barrage in the run-up to the talks, pounding Ukraine’s energy grid and knocking out power and heating in temperatures far below freezing, threatened to overshadow any chances of progress in the Emirati capital.

“Each such Russian strike confirms that attitudes in Moscow have not changed: they continue to bet on war and the destruction of Ukraine, and they do not take diplomacy seriously,” 

“The work of our negotiating team will be adjusted accordingly,” he said, without elaborating.

However, given the “very little progress” that was achieved during the “first round of meetings, many here are not hopeful” that a deal will be struck with Russia, MacAlpine added.

The first round of meetings was held in the UAE last month, marking the first direct public negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv on a plan proposed by US President Donald Trump’s administration to end the conflict – Europe’s worst since World War II.

While the Trump administration has, over the past year, pushed the two sides to find compromises, breaking the deadlock on key issues appears no closer as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of its neighbour approaches later this month.

What are the sticking points?

The main sticking point is the long-term fate of territory in eastern Ukraine, which Russia has occupied. Security guarantees for Ukraine against future Russian attacks have also been an obstacle in the talks to end the conflict.

Moscow is demanding that Kyiv pull its troops out of swaths of the Donbas, including heavily fortified cities atop vast natural resources, as a condition of any deal. It also wants international recognition for the land it annexed in eastern Ukraine.

Kyiv has said the conflict should be frozen along the current front line and has rejected a unilateral pullback of forces.

While Ukraine’s delegation is headed by National Security and Defence Council chief Umerov, Russia is represented by its military intelligence director Igor Kostyukov, a career naval officer sanctioned in the West over his role in the Ukraine invasion.

Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev attended talks in Florida with US officials over the weekend. While neither side released details of what was discussed, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said they were “productive and constructive”.

Witkoff led the US team during last month’s talks.

Russia, which occupies about 20 percent of its neighbour, has threatened to take the rest of the Donetsk region if talks fail.

Ukraine has warned that ceding ground will embolden Moscow and that it will not sign a deal that fails to deter Russia from invading again.

Kyiv still controls about one-fifth of the mineral-rich Donetsk region.

Russia also claims the Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions as its own, and holds pockets of territory in at least three other eastern Ukrainian regions.

The majority of the Ukrainian public is against a deal that hands Moscow land in exchange for peace, according to opinion polls.

On the battlefield, Russia has been notching up gains at immense human cost, hoping it can outlast and outgun Kyiv’s stretched army.

Zelenskyy has been pushing his Western backers to boost their own weapons supplies and heap economic and political pressure on the Kremlin to halt the invasion.