Representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the US will meet today in Abu Dhabi to push forward a peace deal, the first time Moscow and Kyiv have spoken formally since April 2022. The surprise announcement of the tripartite talks came after a flurry of shuttle diplomacy, with White House envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner meeting with Putin in the Kremlin while Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelensky rushed at short notice to Davos for a face-to-face meeting with Trump himself.
The Kremlin has good grounds for believing that the humanitarian crisis triggered by its bombing campaign will eventually spill over into a full-blown political crisis for Zelensky
Before the talks began Witkoff told reporters that just ‘one thing’ remained unresolved on the path to a ceasefire deal, widely assumed to be a reference to Putin’s continued demands that Ukraine withdraw from the 20 per cent of the Donetsk region still under Kyiv’s control. Zelensky also told delegates at the World Economic Forum that the future status of land currently occupied by Russia was unresolved but peace proposals were ‘nearly ready.’
Will this weekend’s talks in Abu Dhabi bring peace to Ukraine? While it’s unlikely that a final deal will be struck immediately, the optimistic reading is that the distance between the two sides will narrow and the latest round of talks will lay the foundations of a ceasefire by summer. The pessimistic view is that Russia believes that it is winning the war both on the ground and through its devastatingly effective campaign of destroying Ukraine’s energy and heating infrastructure, so will try to stall a resolution to the talks for as long as possible.
The Kremlin has good grounds for believing that the humanitarian crisis triggered by its bombing campaign will eventually spill over into a full-blown political crisis for Zelensky – who also faces a deepening corruption scandal as another senior member of his administration was arrested on war profiteering charges. Lack of light and heat in the hardest winter in a decade has, according to Kyiv mayor Vitaly Klitschko, forced some 600,000 Ukrainians from their homes in January alone and triggered anti-government protests in Sumy.
What has changed since the last round of peace talks in Istanbul broke off in early April 2022? Probably the most constant factor then and now are the Kremlin’s demands, which remain stubbornly consistent. In Davos this week Zelensky said that ‘Russians have to be ready for compromises because everybody has to be ready, not only Ukraine, and this is important for us.’ But there is little sign that Moscow is ready to step back from its core demands for constitutional neutrality that will keep Ukraine out of Nato, a cap on the size of Ukraine’s army, equal rights for Russian speakers in Ukraine, a restoration of the properties of the Russian Orthodox Church, a ban on Nazi symbolism and neo-Nazi movements, and lifting bans on Soviet symbols and heritage. The one thing that has changed in Moscow’s list since 2022 is to formalise the annexation of four more Ukrainian provinces – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhiye and Kherson – to Russia. In the first months of the war the Kremlin demanded only the recognition of the annexation of Crimea, with the status of the rest of the occupied territories left undetermined.
In short, the deal on the table in Abu Dhabi is objectively worse in terms of territorial losses than the one Ukraine refused in 2022. Yet at the same time the biggest change in the interim has been in the military capabilities of Ukraine itself. In the first months of the war Ukrainian forces fought off Russian armoured vehicles with man-portable Javelin and anti-tank missiles. Four years and $160 billion in western military aid later, Ukraine boasts a formidable, cutting edge drone industry, produces its own cruise missiles, and has the largest and most battle-hardened army on the European continent other than Russia’s own.
Another difference is that Europe’s political resolve and military capabilities have been tested and found severely wanting. Economic sanctions, which many economists predicted would scupper the Russian economy, were so patchily applied that Russia actually increased its exports of oil and gas over the course of the war. It was US, not European, weapons that made most of the difference on the battlefield, and even then the heavy tanks, fighter jets and air defence batteries that were provided were always too little and too late. Most painful of all, Ukraine discovered that a chorus of assurances from Western allies that Kyiv would be supported with ‘whatever it takes, for as long as it takes’ – a formula first coined by Canadian premier Justin Trudeau in 2022 – turned out to be just words. This week Zelensky’s frustration spilled out as he called Europe a ‘fragmented kaleidoscope of small and middling powers,’ a highly unusual attack on his allies and backers. ‘Instead of taking the lead in defending freedom worldwide, especially when America’s focus shifts elsewhere,’ Zelensky told World Economic Forum delegates at Davos, ‘Europe looks lost, trying to convince the US President to change.’
Back in Spring 2022, the Biden administration stood squarely behind Ukraine’s struggle to resist the Russian invasion. Now, the US spigot to arms and money has been decisively closed, forcing Europe to scramble to source and finance continued military and fiscal aid. More, with Trump’s threats to annexe Greenland, the once unbreakable bonds of Nato membership have been strained to their limit.
Perhaps the most surprising difference between the end of the last talks and their resumption this week is Russia’s military, economic, political and social resilience. Other than a brief wobble during the Wagner mutiny of July 2023, Putin’s political standing remains unchallenged even after four years of unprecedented bloodshed and expense that has left up to 200,000 dead and soaked up 40 per cent of state spending. Yet thanks to nifty fiscal footwork by the Central Bank, the Ruble has remained steady and massive influxes of state cash into the armaments industry have kept Russia’s economy growing throughout the war –though at the cost of cripplingly high interest rates and unsustainable private sector debt. More remarkable, though, is the fact that Russia is still recruiting some 40,000 new soldiers every month. Ukraine has universal conscription that is, controversially, brutally enforced by press gangs who scoop men off the streets. Russia, by contrast, has resorted to partial mobilisation of reservists only once, in September 2022, and ever since has lured men to fight in an entirely volunteer army with the promise of money and early release from prison.
At Davos this week Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte pointed out that Russia lost over 30,000 killed in action in the month of December alone – compared to ‘the 1980s in Afghanistan [when] the Soviets lost 20,000 in ten years.’ Rutte’s point was that Moscow’s losses were horribly high and probably unsustainable. But he was also admitting that Russian society under Putin seems to have far greater war resilience than its late Soviet counterpart.
As for the talks themselves, the delegations will be headed by much more senior officials than those who met in Istanbul four years ago. Kyiv’s negotiator is Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s former CIA-trained head of military intelligence and now the head of Zelensky’s presidential administration. Russia’s delegation is led by Admiral Igor Kostyukov, director of Russia’s GU military intelligence agency. Both are tough, senior soldiers with extensive experience of covert war against the other and a keen awareness of their own and their enemies’ vulnerabilities. It’s possible that one early point of compromise would be a deal for Russia to stop striking Ukrainian energy grids in exchange for Ukraine’s quitting attacks on oil refineries and pipelines.
Trump said that Putin and Zelensky would be ‘stupid’ if they failed to come together and get a deal done. The speed at which the Abi Dhabi talks have come together suggests that a deal on postwar security guarantees may been privately agreed between Washington and Kyiv. What remains is for Putin to end a war that he believes, for the moment, he is winning. When or what exactly will persuade Putin to call an end to his immensely pointless and harmful military adventure is the biggest, and most opaque, question of them all.
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