Negotiators from Russia, Ukraine and the US are meeting in Abu Dhabi for their first trilateral talks since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the United Arab Emirates Foreign Ministry says. Ukraine is engaging with the process because it wants peace more than anyone, but also because it needs to keep the US onside. It learned that lesson the hard way last year, when Donald Trump briefly suspended intelligence sharing and military aid. Russia insists that Ukraine should hand over the big slice of the eastern Donbas region, which it has failed to win on the battlefield. There's also the giant new doubt about how good a guarantee from Donald Trump really is: the US president's fixation on "acquiring" Greenland has severely undermined Nato.

Source: Daily Nation January 24, 2026 11:58 UTC