Trump sees opening for Ukraine peace deal, but key questions remain ahead of Abu Dhabi talks

President Donald Trump said there was increasing willingness from both Russia and Ukraine to end the war, as representatives from Kyiv and Moscow headed to Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for the first peace talks since February.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said both sides were battle-weary, more than four and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“We’re also seeing a very strong inclination to end Russia and Ukraine [war],” Trump said ahead of the U.S.-brokered negotiations, adding that, “We’re involved in that because I want to see people stop getting killed again.”

His comments followed a U.S. official’s assessment that Moscow and Kyiv were privately showing some flexibility over a possible exchange of territory, according to Reuters.

A senior Ukrainian official, however, rejected suggestions that Kyiv was considering territorial concessions, telling Reuters that any discussion of territory would have to take place between national leaders and be accompanied by appropriate security guarantees.

Russia has publicly maintained its demand that Ukraine surrender the entire eastern Donbas region, including territory Moscow has not captured.

William Courtney, former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia and adjunct senior fellow at RAND, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Tuesday that there are “no signs thus far” that the Kremlin is showing any willingness to negotiate seriously towards a ceasefire milestone, which he considers a logical “first step.”

He noted that Ukraine’s proposal for a ceasefire along the current battle line would accept Russia’s de facto control of occupied territory without formally recognizing it, calling it a concession by Kyiv, and said it was puzzling that Trump stopped backing the proposal after Putin objected at their Alaska meeting last year.

Courtney also pointed to Russia’s continued missile and drone attacks and efforts to destroy bridges over the Dnieper River, arguing that Moscow’s aims toward Ukraine had not changed. He said serious talks would be unlikely without a shift in Russia’s objectives or on the battlefield.

In his nightly address late Monday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Washington to convince Russia to end the war and said recent Ukrainian battlefield gains and mounting Russian losses had improved Kyiv’s bargaining power.

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are set to lead Washington’s mediation efforts, while Russia has said Putin aide Vladimir ​Medinsky will serve ⁠as Moscow’s chief negotiator ​at the Abu Dhabi talks, where postwar security guarantees for Ukraine are expected to feature prominently.

Courtney said such guarantees are issues for further into the future, after a ceasefire has already been agreed on. “It looks like because Russia has objected to a ceasefire proposal that Ukraine and the U.S. earlier last year made, that the Trump administration is no longer trying to achieve a ceasefire, even though that’s logically the first step,” he said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that discussions had advanced on a possible postwar security framework for Ukraine and Europe.

“Nothing’s been finalized yet, and maybe some progress can be made in Abu Dhabi,” Rubio said.

The renewed diplomacy comes amid continued fighting and mounting questions over the scale of Russia’s wartime losses.

Belarusian Cyber Partisans, an opposition-linked hacker group, said its analysis of data it claims was obtained from Russia’s state statistics agency identified 393,881 deaths linked to military operations or their consequences between 2022 and August 2026.

The group said its count was based on death records explicitly coded as resulting from hostilities or their consequences. It acknowledged that the figure could include civilians and deaths connected to other conflicts, while excluding personnel who are missing but have not been declared dead.

Rosstat has acknowledged that it was targeted in cyberattacks but denied that its databases were compromised, according to a Russian media outlet Kommersant. The hackers’ claims and the underlying dataset have not been independently verified in full.

Separately, 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.

At the upper end, that would be more than nine times the combined Soviet and Russian military fatalities in wars since World War II, according to the think tank.

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. The newspaper said it had cross-checked a sample of names, but could not verify the data set in its entirety.