Russian and Ukrainian negotiators agreed to a large-scale prisoner exchange on Wednesday, the second and final day of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi, according to several of the parties.<\/p>\n
The second day of the talks – which ended a more than eight-month hiatus in diplomatic efforts between the warring sides – wrapped up after less than two hours, state-run Russian TASS news agency and Ukraine’s Interfax news agency reported.<\/p>\n
US envoy Jared Kushner spoke of “some pretty tough discussions after almost eight months of not being together.”<\/p>\n
“The conversations were very thorough,” Kushner added. “We covered all the relevant issues and were able to do a good exchange of ideas; [in] some areas we see places where we find compromises, [in] others we need to have more discussions. This was a good first step.”<\/p>\n
Prisoner swap<\/p>\n
“One of the positives was that we agreed we are going to have the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, which we are going to finalize the numbers [of] tomorrow,” Kushner said.<\/p>\n
He said he would travel with fellow envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow on Thursday to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “to go over what was discussed today.”<\/p>\n
Russian sources confirmed that Moscow and Kiev had agreed on a major prisoner exchange during the Abu Dhabi talks.<\/p>\n
Details regarding the number of prisoners and the procedure will be provided at a later date, chief Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky told a press conference following the talks.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had announced plans for the exchange of between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners. The Russian General Staff spoke of more than 1,000 prisoners to be handed over by each side over the next two to three weeks.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian chief negotiator David Arakhamia, parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s party, expressed hope of a breakthrough in negotiations by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
He said “really big progress” had been made on other issues that he could not get into at present, while calling for a second round of talks to be scheduled soon.<\/p>\n
Medinsky praised the role played by Witkoff and Kushner during the talks. Wednesday’s negotiations were significantly shorter than those on the first day.<\/p>\n
Focus on security issues<\/p>\n
Security issues were at the core of the meeting, Medinsky said. He said the discussions centred on security guarantees not just for Ukraine, but also for Russia once the war has ended. The security of one country must not come at the expense of the other’s need for protection, Medinsky said.<\/p>\n
One of Russia’s reasons for starting the war against Ukraine was because Moscow perceives Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership as a threat to its own security.<\/p>\n
European representatives had also been present on the sidelines of the talks in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. But Medinsky said the Russian side had no contact with them, adding that it was not clear what their purpose in travelling there had been.<\/p>\n
Ahead of the talks, Moscow had opposed European demands for a seat at the table.<\/p>\n
Prior to this week’s talks, the last such meeting had taken place in Geneva in February, following two previous rounds of negotiation in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian and Ukrainian negotiators agreed to a large-scale prisoner exchange on Wednesday, the second and final day of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}