Kyiv and Moscow head to Abu Dhabi for first talks since February as Trump claims momentum to end war

What is on the table in Abu Dhabi

On Tuesday, Ukrainian and Russian representatives went to Abu Dhabi for the first in-person peace push since February, with Washington set to mediate. U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are slated to lead the American side.

Moscow said Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, will be its lead negotiator. Guarantees for Ukraine after the war are expected to be a central theme. In remarks at the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump said both sides are worn down after over 4.5 years of fighting since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. "We're also seeing a very strong inclination to end Russia and Ukraine [war]," he said, adding, "We're involved in that because I want to see people stop getting killed again."

Positions, pressure and the ceasefire question

A U.S. official assessed, per Reuters, that Moscow and Kyiv were quietly showing some flexibility regarding a possible exchange of territory. A senior Ukrainian official pushed back, saying Kyiv was not weighing territorial concessions and that any such discussion would be reserved for national leaders and would need to come with appropriate security guarantees. Russia, meanwhile, has publicly demanded that Ukraine hand over the entire eastern Donbas region, including areas it does not yet hold.

Speaking to CNBC's Dan Murphy on Tuesday, William Courtney - a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and to Georgia and an adjunct senior fellow at RAND - said there are "no signs thus far" the Kremlin is serious about negotiating toward a ceasefire, which he described as the logical "first step." He noted Ukraine's proposal to freeze the lines along the current front would accept Russia's control of occupied territory in practice without recognizing it in law, characterizing that as a concession by Kyiv. He called it puzzling that Trump withdrew his backing for that approach following Putin's objection at their Alaska meeting last year, and he pointed to continued Russian missile and drone strikes and attempts to take down bridges over the Dnieper River as evidence Moscow's objectives have not shifted. His view: serious talks likely require a change in Russia's aims or on the battlefield. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said progress had been made on a potential security architecture for Ukraine and Europe after the war, adding, "Nothing's been finalized yet, and maybe some progress can be made in Abu Dhabi." Courtney argued such guarantees belong later in the process, after a ceasefire.

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The cost drivers behind the diplomacy

Fighting continues while questions mount about Russia's losses. Belarusian Cyber Partisans, a hacker collective tied to the opposition, said it analyzed data it claims came from Russia's state statistics agency and found 393,881 deaths linked to military activity or its aftereffects from 2022 through August 2026. The group said it counted death records explicitly marked as caused by hostilities or their consequences.

It acknowledged the total might include civilians and deaths from other conflicts, and that it would miss personnel who are still missing and not officially declared dead. Rosstat has said it faced cyberattacks but denied its databases were breached, according to Kommersant. Neither the assertions nor the underlying data set has been fully verified.

Separately, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put Russian military deaths between 400,000 and 450,000 for the period from February 2022 through June 2026. At the high end of its range, the think tank said that total exceeds the combined Soviet and Russian wartime deaths since World War II by a factor of more than nine. The Moscow Times, drawing on a broader analysis of leaked documents, said that roughly 450,000 war-related deaths would place the conflict as Russia's fourth-leading cause of death since 2022. The outlet said it verified a sample of names against other sources but could not authenticate the entire dataset.

Why investors should care

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly address late Monday, urged Washington to pressure Russia to halt the war, adding that recent Ukrainian advances and mounting Russian losses have improved Kyiv's bargaining position. The bottom line: the talks are happening alongside continued fighting, public red lines and private signals about potential tradeoffs. Watch whether a ceasefire becomes the near term focus and how the discussion of territorial control and security guarantees evolves in Abu Dhabi, because that path will shape the conflict's direction and the stability that feeds into markets and your portfolio.

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