Talks with U.S. and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi were constructive but major challenges remain, Kremlin says

Source: THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

Ne­go­ti­a­tions aimed at end­ing Rus­sia’s in­va­sion of Ukraine are yield­ing ap­par­ent signs of progress, but ma­jor chal­lenges re­main on the path to a fi­nal set­tle­ment, a se­nior Krem­lin of­fi­cial said Mon­day.

Talks be­tween en­voys from Ukraine, Rus­sia and the Unit­ed States in re­cent days in Abu Dhabi were con­struc­tive and an­oth­er round is planned for next week, Krem­lin spokesman Dmit­ry Peskov told jour­nal­ists.

He re­port­ed no ma­jor break­through so far, how­ev­er, and added: “The very fact that these con­tacts have be­gun in a con­struc­tive way can be as­sessed pos­i­tive­ly, but there is still se­ri­ous work ahead.”

Of­fi­cials re­vealed few de­tails of the talks held on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, which were part of a year­long ef­fort by the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion to steer the sides to­ward a peace deal and end al­most four years of all-out war.

While Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian of­fi­cials have agreed in prin­ci­ple with Wash­ing­ton’s calls for a com­pro­mise, Moscow and Kyiv dif­fer deeply over what an agree­ment should look like.

Mean­while, the grind­ing war of at­tri­tion along the rough­ly 1,000-kilo­me­ter (600-mile) front line snaking through east­ern and south­ern Ukraine has dragged on, and Ukrain­ian civil­ians are en­dur­ing an­oth­er win­ter of hard­ship af­ter Russ­ian bom­bard­ment of cities in the rear.

U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has set out dead­lines for an agree­ment and threat­ened ad­di­tion­al sanc­tions on Moscow, but Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin ap­par­ent­ly hasn’t budged from his pub­lic de­mands.

Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Ze­len­skyy al­so de­scribed the Abu Dhabi talks as con­struc­tive. He added Sun­day that a doc­u­ment set­ting out U.S. se­cu­ri­ty guar­an­tees for Ukraine in a post­war sce­nario is “100% ready,” al­though it still needs to be for­mal­ly signed.

Kyiv has in­sist­ed on post­war Amer­i­can se­cu­ri­ty com­mit­ments as part of any broad­er peace agree­ment with Moscow af­ter Rus­sia’s 2014 il­le­gal an­nex­a­tion of Crimea and sup­port for sep­a­ratist rebels in east­ern Ukraine, fol­lowed by its full-scale in­va­sion in Feb­ru­ary 2022.

Ze­len­skyy has ac­knowl­edged that there are fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences be­tween Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian po­si­tions, though he said last week that peace pro­pos­als are “near­ly ready.”

A cen­tral is­sue is whether Rus­sia should keep or with­draw from ar­eas of Ukraine its forces have oc­cu­pied, es­pe­cial­ly Ukraine’s east­ern in­dus­tri­al heart­land called the Don­bas, and whether it should get land there that it hasn’t yet cap­tured.

Ne­go­tia­tors will re­turn to the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates on Feb. 1 for an­oth­er round of talks, ac­cord­ing to a U.S. of­fi­cial, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty be­cause they were not au­tho­rized to speak to the me­dia. The week­end talks cov­ered a broad range of mil­i­tary and eco­nom­ic mat­ters and in­clud­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cease­fire be­fore a com­pre­hen­sive deal, the of­fi­cial said.

Rus­sia’s De­fense Min­istry said Mon­day that air de­fences downed 40 Ukrain­ian drones late Sun­day and ear­ly Mon­day, in­clud­ing 34 over the Krasnodar re­gion and four over the Sea of Azov.

Krasnodar of­fi­cials said drone frag­ments fell on two in­dus­tri­al plants in the city of Slavyan­sk, spark­ing fires that were ex­tin­guished. One per­son was in­jured, they said.

By con­trast, Ukraine’s gen­er­al staff said an oil re­fin­ery in the Krasnodar re­gion was tar­get­ed by Ukrain­ian forces. The fa­cil­i­ty sup­plied the Russ­ian mil­i­tary, it added.

Russ­ian forces launched 138 drones at Ukraine overnight, 110 of which were shot down or sup­pressed, Ukraine’s air force said, and 21 of them hit tar­gets in 11 lo­ca­tions. —(AP)