Russia, Ukraine hold talks after ‘productive’ opening session
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators returned to the table for a second day of peace talks following what both sides described as a “productive” opening session.
Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin's envoy to the talks, said on Thursday that there was progress and a positive movement forward in the US-brokered negotiations in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.
Dmitriev said that active work was underway to restore Russia’s relations with the United States, including within the framework of a US-Russia working group on the economy.
He criticized European leaders for hindering the peace process by meddling in the affairs.
“The warmongers from Europe, from Britain, are constantly trying to interfere with this process, constantly trying to meddle in it. And the more such attempts there are, the more we see that progress is definitely being made,” Dmitriev said.
“There is positive movement forward,” he said, in comments supplied by his press service.
Ukraine's top negotiator Rustem Umerov confirmed the start of talks on Thursday. "We are working in the same formats as yesterday: trilateral consultations, group work and further synchronization of positions," he wrote in a Facebook post.
Following Wednesday’s meetings, Umerov said that the discussions were “meaningful and productive, focusing on concrete steps and practical solutions.”
The administration of US President Donald Trump has been pushing both Kiev and Moscow to find a compromise to end the war, Europe’s most destructive conflict since World War II.
Meanwhile, in a rare assessment of battlefield casualties, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a French television network on Wednesday that 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died since Moscow launched its special operation in February 2022.
He pointed out that a “large number” of soldiers are also missing. Experts, who put the number of casualties much higher, say neither Ukraine nor Russia has announced the true number of soldiers killed in the war.
Also on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov asserted that Russian troops would continue to fight the war until Kiev made the right “decisions” required to end the conflict.
The Kremlin says that Ukraine must pull all its troops out of the Russian-speaking Donbas region as a condition to end the war.
Despite Trump's agreement to concede the Russian-speaking Ukrainian territory to Moscow, Kiev has refused so far, rejecting any unilateral pullback of its forces from territory it still controls.
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