Trump Sees Opportunity for Russia-Ukraine Peace in Abu Dhabi Talks: The Main Sticking Points

President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine were showing a growing willingness to end the war as negotiators headed to Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for their first U.S.-brokered peace talks since February.

More than four and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, the delegations face unresolved questions over who controls occupied territory, when the fighting might stop, and what guarantees Ukraine would receive against another attack.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he saw a "very strong inclination" to end the war and that both sides were tired of fighting. "We're involved in that because I want to see people stop getting killed again," he said.

A U.S. official told Reuters that Moscow and Kyiv had privately signaled some flexibility over a possible exchange of territory. A senior Ukrainian official disputed that account, saying Kyiv was not considering territorial concessions and that any discussion of land would have to take place between national leaders and include appropriate security guarantees.

Russia has publicly maintained that Ukraine must surrender all of the eastern Donbas region, including areas Russian forces have yet to capture. Ukraine has proposed a ceasefire along the current front line.

Under that approach, Russian forces would retain de facto control of occupied areas during a truce without Kyiv formally recognizing Russian sovereignty over them. William Courtney, a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia and an adjunct senior fellow at RAND, told CNBC that the proposal was already a concession by Ukraine.

Courtney said he saw little evidence that Moscow was prepared to negotiate a ceasefire seriously. He cited continued Russian missile and drone attacks and efforts to destroy bridges over the Dnieper River. He also questioned why Trump stopped backing the ceasefire proposal after Russian President Vladimir Putin objected to it at their meeting in Alaska last year.

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are set to lead Washington's mediation, and Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky is due to lead Moscow's delegation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that discussions on a possible postwar security framework for Ukraine and Europe had advanced.

"Nothing's been finalized yet, and maybe some progress can be made in Abu Dhabi," Rubio said. Courtney argued that stopping the fighting should come before settling longer-term security arrangements.

In his nightly address Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Washington to persuade Moscow to end the war. He said recent Ukrainian battlefield gains and mounting Russian losses had strengthened Kyiv's bargaining position ahead of the talks.

The scale of Russia's losses remains disputed. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that 400,000 to 450,000 Russian military personnel were killed between February 2022 and June 2026. The upper end of that estimate is more than nine times the combined Soviet and Russian military death toll in wars since World War II, according to the think tank.

Separately, the Belarusian Cyber Partisans said death records it claimed to have obtained from Russia's statistics agency showed 393,881 deaths linked to military operations or their consequences from 2022 through August 2026. The group said the tally could include civilians and deaths tied to other conflicts. It excludes people who are missing and have yet to be declared dead.

Russia's statistics agency acknowledged it was targeted by cyberattacks but denied its databases were compromised, Kommersant reported. The Moscow Times, citing a broader analysis of the leaked records, reported that roughly 450,000 war-related deaths would make the conflict Russia's fourth most common cause of death since 2022.