Russia reiterates demand for Ukraine to abandon territory as first trilateral talks with U.S. begin

As the first trilateral talks between Ukrainian, Russian and U.S. officials were set to get underway Friday in Abu Dhabi, Moscow made it clear that Russia is not prepared to back down from Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukrainian forces pull out of the country’s eastern Donbas region as a precondition for a peace agreement.

“Russia’s position is well known: Ukraine and its armed forces must leave the Donbas. They must be withdrawn,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists Friday, referring to Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, much of which Russia has occupied during the nearly four-year war. “This is a very important condition.”

Speaking Thursday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the fate of Russian-occupied territory in his country was the last issue standing in the way of a ceasefire deal. 

After President Trump’s senior envoy Steve Witkoff said earlier that the negotiations were “down to one issue,” but declined to elaborate, Zelenskyy told reporters: “It’s all about the eastern part of our country. It’s all about the land … This is the issue which we [have] not solved yet.”

It is the same crucial disagreement that quashed hopes for a peace deal late last year.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, after unilaterally annexing another part of Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, in 2014. After staging elections dismissed by most of the world as a sham in occupied parts of the Donbas region, Putin declared in September 2022 that four regions of eastern Ukraine had also been annexed by Russia. None of the annexations have been recognized by the U.S. or the United Nations, and most countries consider them illegal landgrabs.

The nearly four-year, full-scale conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, and Russian forces continue making small but incremental advances in the Donbas as Ukraine battles to defend its territory with U.S. and European support.

“The issue of Donbas is key,” Zelenskyy told reporters early Friday. “It will be discussed, and the modalities as seen by the three sides will be addressed in Abu Dhabi today and tomorrow.”

The mere fact that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators are sitting down together with U.S. envoys for the first time on Friday has been taken as a sign of some progress, but there has yet to be any indication of movement on the territorial issue.

Putin has threatened repeatedly to seize full control of the Donbas region if peace talks fail.

Ukraine, backed by its European partners and the NATO chief, has warned that ceding territory to Russia would embolden Moscow to potentially pursue future attacks on its own territory and potentially neighboring nations. 

Zelenskyy’s administration has refused to sign any peace deal that formally cedes occupied land to Russia, and it is also seeking a guarantee that the U.S. would intervene if Russia tries to launch another invasion in the future.

The only way, Zelenskyy said Thursday, to deter Russia from such future aggression is a Western security guarantee that includes an American “backstop.”

“The U.K. and France are ready to actually commit their forces on the ground” to monitor a ceasefire agreement, he said in Davos, at an event during the World Economic Forum, “but the backstop of President Trump is needed. And again, no security guarantees work without the U.S.”

Zelenskyy said Friday that he’d had a “really positive meeting with President Trump and his team” in Davos, and that “the main, core agreement on security guarantees is ready. Now I am waiting for President Trump to name the date and place. That is up to him. We are ready to sign documents that are extremely important for us.”