What Vladimir Putin won in Abu Dhabi Ukraine peace talks

Detailed summary

Donald Trump’s envoys offered the Russian president what he wants: room to stall.

Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.

The Russians surely must be stoked with the outcome of the latest round of U.S.-brokered Ukraine talks in Abu Dhabi. In the United Arab Emirates, Donald Trump’s envoys endorsed the Kremlin’s long-standing demand for everything to be negotiated in one fell swoop.

And the U.S. president subsequently raised the prospect of a “very big” deal involving all of Europe.

The ambitious aim apparently now agreed between Washington and Moscow is to discuss all the issues together. And then to “find a pathway to settle them all at the same time,” Jared Kushner explained to reporters in a post-talks briefing in the UAE’s capital. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was representing the U.S. in the talks, along with Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor who is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East.

So much for sequencing — generally seen by experienced diplomatic negotiators as crucial to any successful peace talks. And so much, too, for starting with a ceasefire or the tiresome breaking down of complex issues into discrete and manageable tasks to try to move things along while raising confidence and inspiring trust.

To be sure, Russia and the United States won’t be able to strike a deal on their own. Ukraine will get a say, and European leaders have already pushed back against Trump’s big, beautiful deal, rejecting any attempt by the White House and the Kremlin to reshape the continent’s security architecture.

But it has been a longstanding Kremlin goal to get the U.S. to agree to the “let’s talk about everything” strategy, a process that will succeed in “diverting attention from what really is the critical issue, and that’s the war on Ukraine,” said Eugene Rumer, who served on the U.S. National Intelligence Council under President Barack Obama.

Rumer told reporters in a briefing that the lack of sequencing speaks volumes and is a hallmark of Russian diplomacy which aims at “muddling any situation.”

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