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Ukraine, Russia Wrap ‘Productive’ First Day of US-Backed Peace Talks
Rescuers work at the site of the apartment building hit by a Russian drone during a Russian missile and drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Dec. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Ukrainian and Russian officials wrapped up a “productive” first day of new US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi, Kyiv’s lead negotiator said on Wednesday, as fighting in Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II raged on.
The two-day trilateral meetings come after Ukraine‘s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had exploited a US-backed energy truce last week to stockpile munitions, attacking Ukraine with a record number of ballistic missiles on Tuesday.
“The work was substantive and productive, focused on concrete steps and practical solutions,” Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine‘s National Security and Defense Council, wrote on X.
Shortly after the talks began, Russian forces struck a crowded market in eastern Ukraine with cluster munitions, killing at least seven people and wounding 15, the Donetsk region’s Governor Vadym Filashkin said.
Umerov said he would prepare a report for Zelenskiy, and talks were expected to continue on Thursday, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Photographs released earlier in the day by the United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry showed the three delegations sitting around a U-shaped table, with US officials seated at the center, including special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
MAJOR DIFFERENCES REMAIN ON KEY POINTS
Trump’s administration has pushed both Kyiv and Moscow to find a compromise to end the four-year-old war, but the two sides remain far apart on key points despite several rounds of talks with US officials.
The most sensitive issues are Moscow’s demands that Kyiv give up land it still controls and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which sits in a Russian-occupied area.
Moscow wants Kyiv to pull its troops out of all of the Donetsk region, including a belt of heavily fortified cities regarded as one of Ukraine‘s strongest defenses, as a precondition for any deal.
Ukraine said the conflict should be frozen along the current front line and has rejected any unilateral pullback of its forces.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Russian troops would keep fighting until Kyiv made “decisions” that could bring the war to an end.
Russia currently occupies about 20% of Ukraine‘s national territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region seized before the 2022 invasion. Analysts say Russia has gained about 1.5% of Ukrainian territory since early 2024.
“Russia is not winning its war against Ukraine,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told online media outlet Liga on Tuesday. He argued that Moscow was paying a heavy price in terms of battlefield casualties and economic harm for small territorial advances.
UKRAINIANS OPPOSE PAINFUL CONCESSIONS
Polls show that the majority of Ukrainians oppose a deal that hands Moscow more land. Kyiv residents told Reuters on Wednesday they were skeptical that the new round of talks would bring any major breakthroughs.
“Let’s hope that it will change [something], of course. But I don’t believe it will change anything now,” Serhii, 38, a taxi driver, told Reuters. “We will not give in, and they will not give in either.”
The first round of talks was held in the UAE last month, marking the first direct public negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed their ties during a video call on Wednesday held in the run-up to the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said Xi – who it said supported this week’s talks – had invited Putin to China in the coming months. Beijing has sought to cast itself as a peacemaker in the war and is a close ally of Moscow, which is increasingly struggling to fund its vast war economy.
A source close to the government told Reuters that Russia‘s public deficit could balloon to almost triple the official target by end-2026.
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US Condemns South Africa’s Expulsion of Israeli Diplomat
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa attends the 20th East Asia Summit (EAS), as part of the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Oct. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain
The United States on Tuesday condemned South Africa’s decision to expel Israel’s top diplomat last week, a State Department spokesperson said, calling the African nation’s step a part of prioritizing “grievance politics.”
“Expelling a diplomat for calling out the African National Congress party’s ties to Hamas and other antisemitic radicals prioritizes grievance politics over the good of South Africa and its citizens,” Tommy Pigott, the State Department’s deputy spokesperson, said on X.
South Africa’s embassy in Washington had no immediate comment.
On Friday, South Africa declared the top diplomat at Israel’s embassy persona non grata and ordered him out within 72 hours.
It accused him of “unacceptable violations of diplomatic norms and practice,” including insulting South Africa’s president.
Israel responded by expelling South Africa’s senior diplomatic representative to its country.
Relations between the countries have been strained since South Africa brought a genocide case over Israel’s defensive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza at the International Court of Justice. Israel has rejected the case as baseless, calling it an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention and noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
The genocide case has also contributed to US President Donald Trump’s attacks on Pretoria, including verbal scolding, trade sanctions, and an executive order last year cutting all US funding.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, actively confronting the Jewish state on the international stage.
Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Hamas, hosting officials from the Palestinian terrorist group and expressing solidarity with their “cause.”
In one instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led a crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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Russia Says Uranium Proposal for Iran Is Still on the Table
Spokeswoman of Russia’s Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova attends the annual press conference held by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov
Russia‘s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that a proposal to remove uranium from Iran as part of a deal to ease US concerns was still on the table, but that it was for Tehran to decide whether or not to remove it.
“Russia once offered to export Iran‘s enriched uranium reserves to its territory. This initiative is still on the table,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.
“Only Iranians have the right to dispose of them, including deciding whether to export them outside the territory of Iran and, in case of a positive decision, where to export them to or not,” she said.
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US, Iran to Seek De-Escalation in Nuclear Talks in Oman, Regional Official Says
USA and Iranian flags are seen in this illustration taken, Sept. 8, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The US and Iran are due to hold talks in Oman on Friday after Tehran requested a change of venue to limit negotiations to its nuclear program, a regional official said, with a build-up of US forces in the Middle East raising fears of a confrontation.
Iran wanted the meeting to take place in Oman as a continuation of previous rounds of talks held in the Gulf Arab country on its nuclear program, asking for a change of location from Turkey to avoid any expansion of the discussions to issues such as Tehran’s ballistic missiles, the regional official said.
Iran has said it will not make concessions on its formidable ballistic missile program — one of the biggest in the Middle East — calling that a red line in negotiations.
Tehran, which says it replenished its stockpile of ballistic missiles since coming under attack from Israel last year, has warned that it will unleash its missiles to defend the Islamic Republic if its security is under threat.
The regional official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iran had since the beginning stressed that it would only discuss its nuclear program, while Washington wanted other issues on the agenda.
Oil prices extended gains on Wednesday after the US shot down an Iranian drone and armed Iranian boats approached a US-flagged vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, rekindling fears of an escalation between Washington and Tehran.
IRAN SOUGHT BILATERAL TALKS
Trump has warned that “bad things” would probably happen if a deal could not be reached, ratcheting up pressure on the Islamic Republic in a standoff that has led to mutual threats of air strikes and stirred fears of a wider war.
On Tuesday, the US military shot down an Iranian drone that “aggressively” approached the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, the US military said, in an incident first reported by Reuters.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday: “We are negotiating with them right now.” He did not elaborate and declined to say where he expected talks to take place.
A source familiar with the situation said Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was due to take part in the talks, along with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.
Ministers from several other countries in the region including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates had also been expected to attend, but the regional source told Reuters that Tehran wanted only bilateral talks with the US.
In June, the United States struck Iranian nuclear targets, joining in at the close of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign.
More recently, the US navy built up forces in the region following Iran‘s violent crackdown against anti-government demonstrations last month, the deadliest since Iran‘s 1979 revolution.
Trump, who stopped short of carrying out threats to intervene, has since demanded nuclear concessions from Iran, sending a flotilla to its coast.
Iran’s leadership is increasingly worried a US strike could break its grip on power by driving an already enraged public back onto the streets, according to six current and former Iranian officials.
The priority of the diplomatic effort is to avoid conflict and de-escalate tension, a regional official told Reuters earlier.
TANKER INCIDENT
Iranian sources told Reuters last week that Trump had demanded three conditions for the resumption of talks: zero enrichment of uranium in Iran, limits on Tehran’s ballistic missile program, and an end to its support for regional proxies.
Iran has long said all three demands are unacceptable infringements of its sovereignty, but two Iranian officials told Reuters its clerical rulers saw the ballistic missile program, rather than uranium enrichment, as the bigger obstacle.
Since the US strikes in June, Tehran has said its uranium enrichment work – which it says is for peaceful, not military purposes – has stopped.
In another incident on Tuesday, this one in the Strait of Hormuz, the US Central Command said Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces had approached a US-flagged tanker at speed and threatened to board and seize it.
Maritime risk management group Vanguard said the Iranian boats ordered the tanker to stop its engine and prepare to be boarded. Instead, the tanker sped up and continued its voyage.