Negotiators in Abu Dhabi for Ukraine peace talks

ABU DHABI, February 5 ------ Negotiators from Ukraine, Russia, and the United States were set to gather in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, seeking to advance talks on how to end the four-year war. Several rounds of diplomacy between the sides have failed to strike a deal on ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, which began when Russia invaded in February 2022.

A massive 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,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. “The work of our negotiating team will be adjusted accordingly,” he said, without elaborating.

The main sticking point is the long-term fate of territory in eastern Ukraine. Moscow is demanding that Kyiv pull its troops out of swathes of the Donbas, including heavily fortified cities atop vast natural resources, as a precondition of any deal. It also wants international recognition that the land seized in the invasion belongs to Russia. Kyiv has said the conflict should be frozen along the current front line and has rejected a unilateral pull-back of forces.

The talks -- set to last Wednesday and Thursday -- were postponed from last weekend due to what the Kremlin called scheduling issues between the three sides.

Prepare for the worst

Ukraine’s delegation will be headed by Security Council chief Rustem Umerov, a shrewd negotiator hailed by colleagues as a worker of diplomatic “wonders”. Russia’s top negotiator will be its military intelligence director, Igor Kostyukov, a career naval officer sanctioned in the West over his role in the Ukraine invasion. At a previous round of talks in Abu Dhabi last month, the US team was led by President Donald Trump’s ubiquitous envoy Steve Witkoff.

Russia, which occupies around 20 percent of its neighbor, 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. Russia claims the Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions as its own, and holds pockets of territory in at least three other Ukrainian regions in the east.

The majority of the Ukrainian public is against a deal that hands Moscow land in exchange for peace, according to opinion polls. Many Ukrainians find the idea of ceding ground that its soldiers have defended for years as unconscionable.

Zelensky 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. Following the first round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi last month, Ukrainians were doubtful any deal could be struck with Moscow.

Source: manilatimes.net