Russia and Ukraine have agreed on an exchange of prisoners of war during their negotiations in Abu Dhabi. This was stated by Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, after the conclusion of the talks, as reported by Der Spiegel. According to that report, the concrete details of the agreement are to be announced at a later point in time.
According to the Russian state news agency Tass, the second day of the trilateral talks held under US mediation lasted less than two hours and was therefore shorter than the opening on Tuesday. The negotiations, scheduled for two days, are the first direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv in more than eight months.
How many prisoners will be released?
The scale of the exchange remains open so far. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had spoken on Tuesday of 1,000 to 1,500 soldiers per side who could be exchanged, as zdfheute.de reports. How large the number actually is was initially not known, as t-online reported on Tuesday.
Already at the last direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in February in Geneva, an exchange of 500 prisoners each had been agreed, which was implemented in March in two stages. According to Ukrainian figures, there have been at least 78 prisoner exchanges since the start of the war in February 2022, in which a total of just under 10,000 Ukrainians were freed. Most recently, the warring parties exchanged prisoners in October.
Kushner and Witkoff to travel on to Moscow
According to Kushner, the US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner intend to travel to Moscow this Thursday for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Steve and I will travel to Moscow tomorrow to meet President Putin, to take stock of what was discussed today and to try to make progress,” Kushner said, according to spiegel.de. After that, he said, he and Witkoff wanted to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Dublin “to brief him and to deepen some of the ideas we have put forward”. Kushner described the talks in Abu Dhabi as a “first good step”.
Before the talks, Ukraine’s chief negotiator and head of the foreign intelligence service, Rustem Umerov, had stated that after the trilateral talks between the delegations from Ukraine, the USA and Russia, the team from Kyiv would meet the European partners. According to Umerov, representatives of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, as well as the EU and Nato, took part in the consultations before the start of the negotiations. According to welt.de, Günter Sautter, foreign and security policy adviser to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, travelled to Abu Dhabi for Germany.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rejected an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. It would be wiser first to discuss the outlines of a future security architecture in Europe and only then to talk about a truce in Ukraine, Lavrov said with a view to the talks in Abu Dhabi, as Die Welt reports.
What has not yet been clarified
No details were initially known about possible further results beyond the agreed prisoner exchange. According to the participants, the talks are focused on security guarantees for Ukraine, but also for Russia and the entire region. The head of the Russian delegation, Medinsky, expressed the hope that the meeting would make it possible “to make progress on the path to peace – in the interest of the people in Russia and the people in Ukraine”. However, the positions of both sides remain far apart.
Ukrainian President Zelensky called the first day of negotiations “constructive and quite substantive”. Above all, he said, the focus was on humanitarian issues: prisoner exchanges, the return of imprisoned Ukrainian civilians and the repatriation of children who had been abducted from Ukraine. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the meeting very productive, but said “a great deal of work” remained to be done. He said the aim was also to extend the trilateral negotiations to Europe as they continue, Rubio said at the conclusion of the G7 ministerial meeting in Paris.
Editor’s note: Whether the exchange will still be implemented in November and how many people will actually be released cannot be deduced from the information available. Kushner and Witkoff intend to travel to Moscow on Thursday to speak with President Putin, and afterwards to Dublin to meet President Zelensky.
