Trump declared a "very strong inclination" of Russia and Ukraine to end the war before talks in Abu Dhabi

On Tuesday, November 10, the first tripartite talks in several months will begin in Abu Dhabi with the participation of representatives of the USA, Ukraine and Russia - the first such meeting since February. On the American side, the negotiations are headed by special representatives Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the main points of discussion will be a possible system of post-war security guarantees for Kyiv and Europe.

Ahead of the meeting, US President Donald Trump said he saw a "very strong inclination" on both sides to end the war, which Russia started with a full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to him, both Ukraine and Russia are tired of war after more than four and a half years of hostilities. One of the US officials told Reuters that Moscow and Kyiv are privately showing some flexibility regarding a possible exchange of territories.

At the same time, a high-ranking official from the Ukrainian side refuted the assumption that Kyiv is ready for territorial concessions, stressing that any decision regarding the territories can be made only at the level of the heads of state and must be accompanied by reliable security guarantees. Russia publicly continues to demand that Ukraine surrenders all of Donbas - including the areas that Russian forces were unable to capture by force.

Zelensky: successes at the front strengthen Ukraine's position

In his evening address, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi noted that the recent successes of the Ukrainian troops and the growing losses of Russia strengthen Kyiv's negotiating position, and called on Washington to persuade Moscow to end the war. Rubio, for his part, said that negotiations on the framework of security guarantees have progressed, although there are no final agreements yet: "Nothing has been agreed yet, maybe in Abu Dhabi it will be possible to achieve some progress," he said.

In parallel with diplomatic efforts, new estimates of Russia's losses in the war appear. The Belarusian hacking group Cyber ​​Partisans said it analyzed data purportedly obtained from the Russian statistics service Rosstat and found 393,881 deaths related to hostilities or their consequences between 2022 and August 2026. By the group's own admission, this number may include civilian deaths and deaths related to other conflicts, and does not include missing persons who are not officially recognized as dead; it has not yet been possible to fully independently verify this data (Rosstat has confirmed cyber attacks, but denies the leakage of databases). Analysts of the American CSIS center estimate the losses of the Russian military for the period from February 2022 to June 2026 at 400-450 thousand people - at the upper limit of this range, the indicator is more than nine times greater than the combined combat losses of the USSR and Russia in all wars after the Second World War.