Ukraine Peace Talks Enter Second Day With a Prisoner Swap on the Table but No Breakthrough Yet

Negotiators from Russia, Ukraine and the United States return to the table in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday for the second day of the first US-mediated trilateral peace talks in nine months, after a first session that both sides described as constructive but which produced no breakthrough. The talks, led on the American side by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are the most substantive direct engagement between Kyiv and Moscow in months — and the test of the second day will be whether discussion of a large prisoner exchange can be turned into a concrete deal. This story continues our coverage of the talks' opening, reported in yesterday's morning briefing.

The first day lasted about four hours and focused largely on humanitarian questions: prisoner exchanges, the return of Ukrainian civilians held captive, and the fate of Ukrainian children taken to Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the session was "constructive and quite substantive", and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it "very productive". A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two sides had discussed a large-scale prisoner swap, although the details would be settled in the coming days, and no number of prisoners and no date for any exchange was announced after the first day. Zelensky also announced what he called a joint position between Ukraine, the European Union and the United States, though its contents were not made public.

The format itself is part of the story. European representatives met the American and Ukrainian teams before the trilateral session, and issued a joint statement insisting that any future deal must respect Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, its right to independent decision-making, and provide credible security guarantees. But the European team was kept outside the main negotiating room for the duration of the session, at Russia's insistence, and Kushner said a lasting settlement would also require direct engagement between Russia and its European partners on the broader security arrangements that affect them. The 9th European Political Community summit convenes in Dublin on Thursday, the morning after the Abu Dhabi round concludes, and European capitals will be watching closely for any sign that the process is moving their way.

Expectations, however, remain deliberately low. Rubio, speaking at a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Paris, cautioned that "there's a lot of work to be done" and that the talks were "not like something that's on the verge of being solved in the next 24 hours or anything like that". No ceasefire was discussed in terms that either side would accept, and the central disagreement — territory, with Russia demanding concessions and Ukraine refusing to surrender land — was untouched. Fighting, meanwhile, has not paused: Zelensky said Russia had used a US-backed energy truce to stockpile munitions before launching a record number of ballistic missiles at Ukraine on Tuesday.

The stakes of the Abu Dhabi process are considerable. Russia's full-scale invasion is now in its fifth year, and Russian forces occupy around a fifth of Ukrainian territory. Previous rounds of talks — in Abu Dhabi in January and February, and in Geneva — produced only humanitarian agreements, and the last prisoner exchange of any scale came in February. Abu Dhabi has nonetheless become the most reliable mediator in the war: the Emirati foreign ministry said in October that it had enabled the exchange of 540 prisoners that month, bringing the total number of people exchanged through its good offices to more than 8,500 since the war began.

What happens next depends on whether the second day can convert the first day's goodwill into something tangible. A confirmed prisoner exchange, even a modest one, would be the first concrete outcome of the resumed trilateral format and a signal that the channel is worth keeping open; failure to agree even that would confirm the sceptics' view that the talks are process without progress. Either way, the delegations are expected to discuss follow-on technical sessions before they leave, and Witkoff has said discussions will continue in the coming weeks. On Reddit, meanwhile, the most discussed thread about the talks is not about the prisoner swap at all but about Europe's place in the room: a r/worldnews post on the US demanding a seat for Europe drew more than 2,200 upvotes and nearly 400 comments, with the top reply asking why the United States is involved at all "instead of Europe just handling its own business" — a reminder that, for much of the public watching, the question of who sits at the table matters almost as much as what is agreed there.