productive

Zelenskyy expects talks to soon lead to another prisoner exchange.

Ukrainian and Russian officials have wrapped up their first day of United States-mediated peace talks and are set to reconvene Thursday, according to Kyiv’s chief negotiator.

Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, described Wednesday’s negotiations in Abu Dhabi as “substantive and productive”. Talks are due to continue into a second day, his spokesperson Diana Davityan said, though no major advance towards ending the nearly four-year war was announced.

The positive outlook came despite fears the talks would be marred by a new wave of Russian attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities said the latest strikes included one that killed seven people at a crowded market, while others further damaged Kyiv’s power infrastructure amid freezing temperatures.

Nevertheless, the talks “focused on concrete steps and practical solutions”, said Umerov.

Negotiations must ‘genuinely move towards peace’

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an evening address, said it was imperative the talks yield concrete results and that he anticipated a prisoner exchange “in the near future”.

“People in Ukraine must feel that the situation is genuinely moving toward peace and the end of the war, not toward Russia using everything to its advantage and continuing attacks,” Zelenskyy said.

The Kremlin said that the “doors for a peaceful settlement are open,” but that Moscow will continue its military assault until Kyiv agrees to its demands.

The central hurdle in ending the war is the status of embattled eastern Ukraine, where Russia continues to make slow, painstaking advances.

Moscow is demanding that Kyiv withdraw its forces from large parts of the Donbas, including heavily fortified cities atop vast natural resources, as a precondition to any deal.

It also wants the world to recognise Russian sovereignty over territory it has seized in the war.

Kyiv is instead pushing for the front lines to be frozen at their current positions and rejects any unilateral troop withdrawal. Polls show that the majority of Ukrainians oppose a deal that hands Moscow more land.

“I think that Ukraine doesn’t have any moral right to give up our occupied territories … because my friends were fighting for that and they died for that,” Sofiia, a resident of Ukraine’s Poltava region, told Al Jazeera.

Unresolved issues ‘diminishing’

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it would likely take time to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough but claimed the administration of President Donald Trump had helped “substantially diminish” the number of unresolved issues between the warring parties.

“That’s the good news,” Rubio told reporters Wednesday. “The bad news is that the items that remain are the most difficult ones. And meanwhile the war continues.”

Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi said Kyiv was “interested in finding out what the Russians and Americans really want”.

He added that the talks – only the second direct engagement between Ukrainian and Russian officials in more than three years – focused on “military and military-political issues”.

Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s national territory, including Crimea and ⁠parts of the eastern Donbas region seized before the 2022 invasion.

Zelenskyy on Wednesday said that the number of Ukrainian troops killed since the start of the war stood at about 55,000, with a “great number” also missing in action.

Total wartime casualties, including both killed and wounded, are estimated to extend into the hundreds of thousands for both sides.

The talks come just a day before a second round of US-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi.

United States special envoy Steve Witkoff has said he held “productive and constructive meetings” with Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev in Florida, as President Donald Trump’s administration presses to end Russia’s nearly four-year war in Ukraine.

“We are encouraged by this meeting that Russia is working toward securing peace in Ukraine,” wrote Witkoff in a post on X following Saturday’s talks.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and White House adviser Josh Gruenbaum also attended the talks.

Neither side released details of what was discussed.

Dmitriev also met Witkoff and Kushner in January on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He also held talks on the Ukraine war with US negotiators in a visit to Miami in December.

Saturday’s meeting comes before Ukrainian and Russian negotiators are expected to hold a second round of talks with US mediators in Abu Dhabi to discuss a US-backed plan to end Russia’s war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later appeared to suggest that the meeting would not take place on Sunday, saying in his nightly address that Ukraine was waiting for more information from the US about further peace talks and expected new meetings to take place next week.

A first US-mediated meeting was held in the United Arab Emirates’s capital last week, marking the first direct public negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv since the early weeks of the war.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this week that he believes “we are getting close” to a deal to end the war.

Trump announced on Thursday that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had agreed to his request not to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for a week amid extreme cold weather, which he said was “very nice” of the Russian president.

The Kremlin confirmed on Friday that Putin had received the request, with spokesperson Dmitry Peskov telling Sky News the Russian leader had “of course” agreed to the proposal.

Zelenskyy wrote on X that the issue of a ceasefire on energy infrastructure attacks had been discussed during last week’s talks, and that he expected the agreements to be implemented. “De-escalation steps contribute to real progress toward ending the war,” he added.

On Friday, the Ukrainian leader said in his nightly address that neither Moscow nor Kyiv had conducted strikes ⁠on energy targets from Thursday night onwards.

Several sticking points over the US-backed plan to end the war remain, including Russia’s demand for Ukrainian forces to withdraw from about one-fifth of the Donetsk region, and the potential deployment of international peacekeepers in Ukraine after the war.