What
Vladimir Putin won in Abu Dhabi Ukraine peace talks
Donald
Trump’s envoys offered the Russian president what he wants: room to stall.
Listen
Russia's
President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri
Ushakov, meets with U.S. envoys at the Kremlin in Moscow on November 12, 2026.
| Sputnik pool photo by Vyacheslav Prokofyev/AFP via Getty Images
Column
November 13,
2026 5:18 pm CET
Jamie
Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.
https://www.politico.eu/article/what-vladimir-putin-won-in-abu-dhabi-ukraine-peace-talks/
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.
Russia’s Foreign Affairs’ Minister Sergei Lavrov delivers a
press-conference following the Collective Security Treaty Organization meeting
in Moscow on November 10, 2026. | Igor Ivanko/AFP via Getty Images
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.”
It’s
difficult to quibble with his pessimism. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a
long track record of using peace talks to delay, obfuscate and exhaust
opponents as he continues doing whatever he wants — all the while insisting
that everything is interconnected and must be solved all at the same time.
Trying to
solve everything means solving nothing. But then that’s the point. “It is
obvious that Putin is simply stalling for time, trying to destroy or capture
Ukraine or win this war of attrition, waiting for aid to stop in Europe and for
Europe to be divided,” Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi told
POLITICO.
The “let’s
negotiate everything together” approach has been a key part of the playbook
Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have used time and again when it
comes to Ukraine, and earlier in Syria. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now his country’s ambassador to London, has been warning
that it is designed to exhaust and wear down opponents and was also a classic
Soviet ploy.
“Putin wants
Empire, Ukrainians want freedom,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador who
served as a Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations during Trump’s
first term, told POLITICO. “The rest is detail.” Assumptions that Putin
wants peace, will negotiate seriously, or will accept a reasonable deal, “are
all misguided,” he added.
Negotiations
as a weapon of war can be used to distract, stall, allow time to maneuver and
to ensnare the well-meaning — something that was highlighted between 2014 and
2017, when Lavrov and then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “negotiated” over
Syria. The talks helped Moscow save Syria’s Bashar al-Assad from defeat,
persuading then-president Obama to take his finger off the trigger and ignore
his own red line on Damascus’ use of chemical weapons.
The only
other top Kremlin aide as relentless as Lavrov in this technique of exhaustive
obfuscation is Putin’s
favorite “historian,” Vladimir Medinsky, who served as an arch-patriotic
culture minister from 2012 to 2020. An advocate of putting up statues of Joseph
Stalin, he has led the Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine stretching back
to Istanbul in 2025. There he invoked the Great Northern War of 1700-21 as a
warning that Russia is ready to fight Ukraine for as long as it takes to win.
Medinsky again led the Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi.
In fact,
Moscow’s red lines have not shifted one iota in the years since Putin launched
his full-scale invasion. The Russian leader and his top aides have emphatically
outlined them for years — conditions that would, in effect, rip the nation of
Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees that Kyiv will never join NATO, that it
will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, with
severe limitations placed on stockpiles of weapons and the size of its army.
Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern regions it claims as part of the
Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such.
And until
then — as Medinsky has bragged — Russia will continue to wage war.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário