Ukraine and Russia concluded a second round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi yesterday aimed at ending Europe’s biggest conflict since the Second World War, with the two sides conducting a major prisoner swap and agreeing to resume negotiations soon.
US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said that the delegations from the US, Ukraine, and Russia had agreed to an exchange of 314 prisoners of war, which took place yesterday at the Ukrainian border.
“While significant work remains, steps like this demonstrate that sustained diplomatic engagement is delivering tangible results and advancing efforts to end the war in Ukraine,” Witkoff said in a post on X, describing the peace talks as “detailed and productive”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the sides had agreed another meeting in the very near future. “The conversation is ongoing. It’s certainly not easy, but Ukraine has been and will be as constructive as possible,” Zelenskiy said at a joint news conference in Kyiv yesterday with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Zelenskiy said the talks covered all the main points of difference between the two sides and the Ukrainian team would deliver their report to him in person because of the sensitivity of the issues.
Zelenskiy said he was keen for the talks to lead to the end of the four-year war but he repeated his insistence that Ukraine must receive robust security guarantees, including from Washington, to ensure Russia will not attack again. Yesterday, Russia’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, said there was progress and a positive movement. He also said work was underway to restore Russia’s relations with the United States, including within the framework of a US-Russia working group on the economy. Russia and Ukraine have exchanged 157 prisoners of war each, the Russian Defence Ministry said. Three civilians from the Kursk region were also returned to Russia.
A video released by Ukraine’s presidency showed dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war – many of them wrapped in the national flag – disembarking from buses in the snow, some hugging each other and others crying as they spoke to relatives on mobile phones.
The prisoner exchange comes after a long pause: the previous one happened in October 2025. POW exchanges were the only concrete steps towards peace that emerged from the previous rounds of talks between Ukraine and Russia that took place last year in Türkiye.
Zelenskiy said he had instructed his negotiating team to discuss further exchanges.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed, wounded, or gone missing during nearly four years of war. Zelenskiy said this week that about 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed on the battlefield, but he gave no details on the number of wounded or missing Ukrainian servicemen.
Washington-based think tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Russia had suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties during the war. Moscow dismissed the report as unreliable.
Despite pressure by the Trump administration on both Kyiv and Moscow to find a compromise, the two sides have so far failed to agree on a ceasefire and fighting continues to rage along the roughly 1,200-km frontline. Russia’s troops launched major air strikes on Ukraine overnight on Tuesday, ahead of the talks, and followed up with smaller drone attacks on Wednesday and yesterday.
Zelenskiy, who has repeatedly pleaded for air-defence missiles to defend Ukraine’s skies, said yesterday that Kyiv was ready to swap its drones, in which it has become a global leader, for air-defence missiles from allies or for Poland’s Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets.
The Ukrainian General Staff, meanwhile, said in a statement its forces had carried out a series of “successful” strikes on a Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile launch site last month. The fate of the eastern Donetsk region, where the most intense battles are taking place, remains one of the most complicated issues in the talks.
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