ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Russia and Ukraine agreed on Wednesday to a large exchange of prisoners of war, officials at the U.S.-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi said, after talks that brought no breakthrough toward ending the war.
“One of the positives is we agreed that we’re going to have the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, which we’re going to finalize the numbers tomorrow,”
Vladimir Medinsky, who led the Russian delegation, and Rustem Umerov, who led Kyiv’s team, both confirmed the planned exchange. No figure and no date for the release were announced.
Moscow first, then Dublin
Kushner said he and fellow U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff will fly to Moscow on Thursday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. The point of the trip, he said, is to go over what was discussed in Abu Dhabi and try to make more progress, because “we see some openings and some opportunities there.”
After Moscow, the two men will travel to Dublin to sit down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kushner said they will debrief Zelenskyy and explore the ideas that came out of the Abu Dhabi sessions with him.
The envoys also want European countries brought into the talks, a wider format that Moscow has resisted. European governments, the European Union and NATO all had representatives in Abu Dhabi, but they consulted with the Ukrainian delegation rather than taking part in the direct negotiations, and Moscow does not want them in the room.
First meeting in nine months
The Abu Dhabi session was the first meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in nine months, and the first three-way round with the United States since talks in Geneva in February. Security guarantees for Ukraine sat alongside the humanitarian issues on the agenda.
Zelenskyy, who was not in Abu Dhabi, said Tuesday’s session was “constructive and quite substantive.” He said the talks dealt mainly with humanitarian questions, including prisoner exchanges, Ukrainian civilians held in captivity and children taken from Ukraine, and that security guarantees were also discussed.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the meeting “very productive.” He also cautioned that an end to the war is not close, saying a breakthrough will take time.
For all the talk of openings, neither side showed any sign of giving ground on its core demands. Control of territory in eastern Ukraine, above all the Donetsk region, remains one of the hardest questions in the way of a settlement.
The fighting went on while the delegations met. The Associated Press reported that Russia struck the southern Zaporizhzhia region and the city of Kharkiv overnight, wounding seven civilians and damaging property, and that both countries are still hitting each other with long-range missiles and drones.