Russia and Ukraine have agreed in principle to a large-scale exchange of prisoners of war in the near future, according to sources close to the Ukrainian delegation, in the one concrete outcome of two days of US-brokered peace talks in Abu Dhabi. The talks have now ended, without a ceasefire and without a breakthrough on the territorial questions at the heart of the war.
The agreement on a prisoner exchange was reported on Tuesday evening by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency and the Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, both citing sources close to the Ukrainian delegation. The reports said the exchange would take place “in the near future” and would be carried out with the facilitation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. No figures and no specific timetable were disclosed.
Neither the Russian nor the Ukrainian government has officially confirmed the deal, and the reports gave no details of how many prisoners would be exchanged or when the swap would take place. But the fact that the agreement was reported by multiple Ukrainian outlets, all citing delegation sources, suggests it was the main tangible result of the two days of talks.
The talks, which began on Tuesday and continued into Wednesday, were the first time Russian and Ukrainian officials had sat down together in nine months, and the first US-brokered meeting between the two sides since February. The American delegation was led by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, with the Russian side led by Vladimir Medinsky and the Ukrainian side by Rustem Umerov.
The first day of talks lasted about four hours, and the United States described the meeting as very productive. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there were “potential ideas to bridge differences” between Moscow and Kyiv, and Kushner told delegates that recent contacts had “really identified and narrowed the gaps”.
But the second day produced no agreement on the central questions. The deepest disagreement is over what should come first: Russia wants to negotiate a broad European security framework before tackling the specifics of the war, while Ukraine and its European backers want a ceasefire first. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the idea of defining a security architecture before resolving the conflict “absolutely reasonable”, a position the Europeans rejected.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that the talks had made little progress, and that assessment was echoed by other accounts of the two days. There was no agreement on a ceasefire, no breakthrough on the status of the Donbas region, and no date set for a third round of talks, although further rounds are expected next week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had called the first day “constructive and quite substantive”, and said the two sides had agreed a joint position on some issues. But he has also made clear that Ukraine will not accept a settlement that trades territory for peace without security guarantees, and that remains the central obstacle.
For the people of Ukraine, the prisoner exchange — if it goes ahead — would be a welcome result. Thousands of soldiers on both sides are held as prisoners of war, and previous exchanges have been among the few humanitarian achievements of the war. A large-scale swap would bring relief to families who have waited years for news of their loved ones.
Whether the talks in Abu Dhabi represent a genuine step towards peace, or simply another round of negotiations that produces little, will become clearer in the coming days. For now, the prisoner exchange is the one concrete outcome of two days of talks — and the question of how to end the war remains as far from resolution as ever.
