It is hard to sell diplomacy as progress when the lights go out mid-sentence. On Saturday, as negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States met in Abu Dhabi for a second day of talks-before parting ways without announcing any results in their efforts to end the nearly four-year-long war-Kyiv awoke to another punishing night of drones and missiles. The city’s mayor said nearly 6,000 buildings were left without heat after the strike, with temperatures well below freezing. This is what war looks like when it is engineered to talk over itself. Russia’s winter campaign against energy infrastructure has relentlessly pushed ordinary people to their limits, transforming daily life into a struggle for safety. What was once considered normal now teeters permanently on the edge of crisis. The second reality sits alongside the first: these talks are being driven less by a mutually ripened readiness for compromise than by the outside world’s impatience for an outcome. Abu Dhabi meetings are the first known direct contact between Ukrainian and Russian officials on the US-backed proposal, with territory flagged as the central dispute. The first draft drew criticism for hewing too closely to Moscow’s line, while later attempts to appease Ukraine (and Europe at large) prompted pushback from Russia over European peacekeepers.
That architecture matters because it shapes what peace is permitted to mean. Which brings us to the plan hovering over the talks. Over recent months, analysts have examined a 28-point framework widely understood to trade Ukrainian sovereignty for a pause in violence-through territorial compromises, constraints on force posture, and an explicit or implicit ceiling on NATO aspirations. If Ukraine is asked to pre-commit to permanent strategic limits, while Russia is asked mainly to reduce the frequency of its strikes, the agreement begins to resemble a managed retreat presented as peacemaking. The temptation in distant capitals is to treat a ceasefire as a moral good regardless of its content. Sadly, the line between ceasefire and surrender is very thin. Kyiv’s predicament is therefore not simply military. The basic asymmetry is visible even to ordinary Ukrainians watching the news, as Russia can keep hitting cities while insisting it is negotiating, whereas Ukraine is urged to prove seriousness by accepting painful compromises. It is in that context that Ukrainian officials have framed the latest strikes as an attack on civilians and on the very idea of talks continuing under bombardment.
None of this is an argument against negotiation. Ukraine has every reason to want an end to attrition, and Europe has every reason to fear a conflict that becomes permanent. But a durable peace requires symmetry in obligations and consequences. It requires that Russia’s capacity to inflict immediate civilian costs is not treated as background noise while Ukraine is asked to pay the price upfront. The world’s most powerful capitals should also be honest about the incentive structures they create. If war can be started, sustained, and then converted into internationally acknowledged gains through a so-called pragmatic settlement, the precedent will travel far beyond Ukraine.
