Washington prepares to mediate renewed negotiations
U.S.-brokered negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are scheduled to begin in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, as President Donald Trump points to growing willingness to end the conflict. According to CNBC, the two-day meeting will bring together American, Russian and Ukrainian officials for their first trilateral talks since February.
Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump described both countries as weary of the fighting, more than four and a half years after Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022. He said Washington saw a strong desire for an end to the war and presented preventing further deaths as the reason for U.S. involvement. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to lead the American mediation effort.
Territorial positions remain contested
Trump's assessment followed a report from Reuters that a U.S. official had detected private flexibility in both Moscow and Kyiv over a potential exchange of territory. That account suggests movement behind the scenes, but it does not establish that either government has accepted a territorial arrangement.
A senior Ukrainian official disputed the suggestion that Kyiv was considering territorial concessions, telling Reuters that discussions about territory would require national leaders and appropriate security guarantees. Russia, meanwhile, continues publicly to demand that Ukraine relinquish the entire eastern Donbas region, including areas Russian forces have not captured. Those stated positions leave a central issue unresolved before the negotiations.
Security guarantees and battlefield leverage shape Kyiv's approach
Postwar security guarantees for Ukraine are expected to be a major subject in Abu Dhabi. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that discussions had progressed on a possible security framework covering Ukraine and Europe. He stressed that no arrangement had been finalized and described the forthcoming talks as a possible opportunity for further progress, rather than a meeting with an agreed outcome.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his Monday evening address, argued that recent battlefield gains and increasing Russian losses had strengthened Ukraine's negotiating position. He urged Washington to persuade Moscow to end the war. His remarks framed Ukraine's military performance as support for its diplomacy, even as fighting continued ahead of the meeting.
Disputed records put Russian losses under scrutiny
The diplomatic effort comes alongside new claims about the scale of Russia's wartime losses. Belarusian Cyber Partisans, an opposition-linked hacking group, said an analysis of records it claims to have obtained from Russia's state statistics agency, Rosstat, identified 393,881 deaths connected to military operations or their consequences between 2022 and August 2026. The group said it counted records explicitly assigned those causes.
That figure cannot be treated as a verified count of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. The group acknowledged that its total could include civilians and deaths associated with other conflicts, while excluding missing personnel who had not been legally declared dead. According to Kommersant, Rosstat acknowledged cyberattacks but denied that its databases had been compromised. Neither the hackers' account nor the complete underlying dataset has been independently verified.
Separate estimates underscore the stakes, not a settled toll
Separately, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that between 400,000 and 450,000 Russian military personnel were killed from February 2022 through June 2026. The think tank said the upper estimate would exceed nine times the combined Soviet and Russian military fatalities in wars since World War II. Its military-loss estimate and the hackers' broader records claim cover different periods and categories and should not be treated as equivalent measures.
The Moscow Times, drawing on a broader analysis of the leaked records, reported that approximately 450,000 war-related deaths would rank the conflict as Russia's fourth most common cause of death since 2022. The newspaper said it had checked a sample of names but could not authenticate the entire dataset. Against that uncertain casualty picture, the immediate diplomatic test is whether the Abu Dhabi discussions can advance a security framework and address the territorial divide; no finalized agreement has been announced.
Source: CNBC