Since 2022, Russia, Ukraine and the West have met again and again. The war goes on.

BORIS BONDAREV

Russian ex-diplomat, expert on Russia’s foreign policy and global security. Author “Time to Win the War: How to Stop Putin’s Russia and Secure a Lasting Peace” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNDHPXB5

OCT 29, 2026

Another meeting between Russia, the US and Ukraine is expected in November in Abu Dhabi. And once again the media are building up expectations: maybe this time they’ll reach a deal, maybe there’s finally a chance to end the war.

First, it’s worth recalling how many such meetings there have already been and what they changed. Let’s briefly go through the history of this “negotiation process.”

A bit of chronology

February 28, 2022: the first meeting of Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Belarus’s Gomel region. March 3: the second round in the Belovezha Forest. March 7: the third. The Russian delegation was led by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky. The sides set out their demands, agreed on humanitarian corridors and on further contacts. The war goes on.

March 10: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba met in Antalya, with Turkey mediating. The war goes on.

March 29: a meeting in Istanbul. They discussed Ukraine’s neutrality, security guarantees, territorial issues. In April, heads of delegations, diplomats, lawyers and military experts kept working on a draft treaty. The treaty was never signed. The war goes on.

July 13, 2022: military representatives of Russia, Ukraine and Turkey met in Istanbul with the UN taking part. On July 22 they signed the grain initiative. This time there was a result: food exports from Ukrainian ports resumed. The war goes on.

May 5, 2023: a separate technical meeting on the grain deal; May 10–11, the next round. In July, Russia pulled out of the initiative. The war goes on.

Abu Dhabi also appeared in this story long before the current announcements. According to Reuters, Russian and Ukrainian representatives discussed a prisoner exchange and the resumption of Russian ammonia transit there as early as November 17, 2022. The war goes on.

In 2025 a new series of meetings began. On March 23–25 in Riyadh, the Americans held separate talks with Russian and Ukrainian representatives. Russia sent Grigory Karasin, chairman of the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, and Sergei Beseda, an adviser to the FSB director. They discussed shipping safety and a halt to strikes on energy infrastructure. The war goes on.

May 16: Istanbul again. On the Russian side were Medinsky, Admiral Igor Kostyukov, head of the GRU military intelligence, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin and Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin. On the Ukrainian side, a delegation led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. The result: a thousand-for-a-thousand prisoner swap. The war goes on.

June 2: the second Istanbul round. Agreements on exchanging prisoners and returning the bodies of the dead. The war goes on.

July 23: the third round. New agreements on exchanges. The war goes on.

November 25: Abu Dhabi. Russian and Ukrainian intelligence officials, meetings with US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll. They discussed prisoners and other undisclosed issues. The war goes on.

December 19–21: Miami. Parallel US consultations with the Ukrainian and Russian sides. The war goes on.

January 23–24, 2026: the first trilateral round in Abu Dhabi. The Russian delegation is led by Kostyukov. They discuss security, territory, possible ceasefire terms. The war goes on.

February 4–5: the second round, same place. The concrete result: a 157-for-157 swap. The war goes on.

February 17–18: Geneva. Medinsky leads the Russian delegation again, with Kostyukov and Galuzin still on it. Political issues, military issues, mechanisms to monitor a future truce. The war goes on.

A separate channel ran through personal meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Steve Witkoff, special envoy of US President Donald Trump. February 11, 2025, Moscow: the release of American teacher Marc Fogel. March 13, Moscow: the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. April 11, St. Petersburg. April 25, Moscow again. August 6, Moscow, a few days before the deadline Trump had set for new sanctions. The meeting lasted about three hours; Russian state media called it “constructive and useful.” The war goes on.

August 15: Trump meets Putin in Anchorage. No agreement on halting hostilities is reached. The war goes on.

December 2, the Kremlin: Witkoff, together with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, presents a revised version of the 28-point plan. The plan was originally drafted in close cooperation with Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and then heavily edited by Ukraine and European capitals. Moscow rejects it. The war goes on.

January 22, 2026: the Kremlin again, Witkoff and Kushner, on the eve of the first trilateral round in Abu Dhabi. September 5, Moscow: according to a White House official, Witkoff and Kushner discussed “substantive plans for next steps” with Putin. The war goes on.

October 21: the ninth meeting, in St. Petersburg. Witkoff brought documents setting out the US approach to a settlement. Judging by the leaks, it was the same original 28-point plan with the dust blown off. Witkoff said he hoped Putin would agree to resume trilateral talks. That is how the November Abu Dhabi meeting came about. The war goes on.

Plenty of media outlets and “analysts” assure us that something positive is bound to happen in November. “Constructive talks,” “significant progress,” “the next round.” These assessments from the participants create a sense of movement. The very fact of another meeting is supposed to show that peace is getting closer.

Quantity doesn’t turn into quality

However, the number of meetings says nothing about the result. After the January round in Abu Dhabi we heard about a constructive atmosphere. After Geneva in February, about significant progress. The war goes on.

What’s more, the whole process has been turned upside down. They discuss the technical parameters of a truce, monitoring mechanisms, future guarantees. But the main thing is missing: a fundamental political decision by ALL sides to stop the fighting. The technical work that should serve to implement such a decision has completely replaced it.

It’s like negotiating a prenup before the couple has even decided to get married. You can spend years agreeing on property issues, arguing over wording, hiring lawyers and scheduling new meetings. The work will go on. Only one of the parties may have no intention of getting married at all. It is perfectly happy with the talking.

Of course, working out terms in advance can help a political decision. But if it turns into a self-sustaining process, preparation for the sake of preparation that leads to no decision, and the consent to discuss hypothetical details is taken as proof of a willingness to reach an agreement in principle, then what’s the point?

This is undeniably a success for Russian diplomacy. It has got everyone to accept a format in which willingness to talk counts as willingness to end the war. Russia takes part in meetings, discusses individual issues, agrees to continue consultations, and can then present all of it as proof of its interest in peace. The war goes on, but that hardly matters, because “Russia has shown readiness for dialogue.”

Western politicians have happily accepted this arrangement. They are administrators and bureaucrats more than politicians and leaders, and they were offered a familiar and comfortable occupation: organizing meetings, agreeing agendas, drafting proposals, reading and sending signals, making loud and empty statements. Someone has already figured out what they should be doing. Very convenient.

This reflects a broader problem with Western policy: adapting to someone else’s power while being unwilling to use its own. Taken together, the West is far stronger than Russia, yet politically it behaves as if only Moscow has options and all the West can do is take them into account and react. Using its own power, economic, political and military, means making decisions, taking responsibility and being ready to face the consequences. That is uncomfortable. “Continuing consultations,” “managing risks” and “de-escalating the escalation” is much more comfortable. You can keep pretending the work is going on and ignore the awkward question of why that work never makes things any better.

Meanwhile Europe keeps complaining that nobody takes it seriously. But how can anyone take seriously someone who doesn’t know what it wants? Or who knows but isn’t willing to make a serious effort to get it?

Diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake keeps getting more expensive

While the West searches for a “diplomatic solution,” the war goes on. Russia keeps destroying Ukraine, Ukraine keeps fighting desperately and losing people, and Europe keeps paying for its pursuit of an imaginary “middle way” with rising costs, political instability and the very risks it believes it is “managing.”

In the end, this so-called “negotiation process” has failed at its task. It hasn’t brought peace one inch closer. On the contrary, over this time the position of Ukraine and of the European part of the West has grown worse. What does that tell us? 

It tells us that the current approach to “diplomacy” doesn’t work.

The favorite argument of the supporters of this “diplomacy,” if you can call it that, is “talking is always better than not talking.” It is about as convincing as the timeless wisdom that “it’s better to be rich than poor,” “better to be healthy than sick” and “peace is better than war.” As slogans, they’re hard to argue with. But ask one of these speakers: what exactly should we talk about? What concrete steps need to be taken for the talk to turn into something more tangible than words? How do we get the other side to stop fighting? By talking even more? Silence. No answer. For some reason, the people who love talking don’t want to talk about this. And the war goes on.

A political tool that has failed to deliver its stated result for years needs, at the very least, an honest review and, if necessary, replacement with something more effective. It can’t be justified forever on the grounds that the next meeting might go better than the last. As the well-known saying goes, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time is a sign of certain intellectual problems.

But this takes some courage: the courage to admit that your assessments and approaches were wrong, and that enormous effort and time have been wasted. Not everyone is capable of that. Few are.

We can’t keep restarting the count as if, before the upcoming Abu Dhabi meeting, there had been no Belarus, no Antalya, no Istanbul, no Riyadh, no Miami, no Geneva. Before announcing the next meeting as a new chance, it would be good to explain why it should work now when it failed in every previous round.

The war goes on.

---

Talks will not end this war. A clear goal and the will to use Western power can. I set out what that strategy should look like in my book, Time to Win the War, available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

New Book: TIME TO WIN THE WAR

BORIS BONDAREV

In the fifth year of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Washington under Trump is trying to sell Ukraine out, or simply to feed it to the predator. Europe, which will be next, watches helplessly and shows little will to overcome its own powerlessness. All this is accompanied by a well-rehearsed chorus of politicos and pundits singing that Russia cannot be deterred, that Putin’s aggression cannot be stopped, and that peace can only be begged from him on his terms. This chorus tries to silence every other view, presents itself as the only champion of peace and calls itself realist.

However, stripped of all disguise, its view is this: an independent Western policy built on Western interests is ‘unrealistic’, and Putin’s interests come before those of American and European voters and taxpayers. Inexplicable fear of Russia, concessions to the aggressor and surrender on his terms are what it calls realism.

Time to Win the War: How to Stop Putin’s Russia and Secure a Lasting Peace, now out in paperback and on Kindle, rejects this so-called realism outright and calls it what it is: the outlook of the faint-hearted, of hothouse flowers who cannot face harsh reality.

The book explains what Putin is actually after. This war is about far more than Ukraine: the current world order is at stake. Putin’s war is an attempt to inflict a strategic defeat on the West and to impose unilaterally a new world order of exclusive spheres of influence, where might makes right, subordinating the interests of the peoples of Ukraine, Europe and the entire democratic world to his own. These goals are incompatible with the security and freedom that the people of the United States and Europe currently enjoy.

Western policy today fails to respond to this threat. It reduces the war to questions of territory and money, ignores its alarming essence and simply tries to adapt to Moscow’s policy. Sitting idle and waiting for a miracle – for Vladimir Putin suddenly to want peace, or for Donald Trump suddenly to tame the Kremlin instead of appeasing it – is childish and unworthy of responsible leaders. Worse, it is a road to the political suicide of the West as a whole.

The book proposes the only real way out: to think like a statesman, one who sets his own goals and pursues his own interests, and does not grovel before the enemy. The moment demands grown-up policy-making: to seek the means to reach the goal, to find them, to strive to turn the goal into reality, and never to yield. Ronald Reagan once summed it up in five words: ‘We win and they lose.’

This is the only truly realistic approach. The combined economic, industrial, military and scientific potential of North America and Europe is many times greater than Russia’s, and their economies alone are more than twenty times the size of Russia’s. There are plenty of resources. What is lacking is the will to use them.

If you read the book, please leave a review on Amazon and share it with anyone who should hear this argument. Your review helps other readers decide whether to read it.

Paperback and Kindle on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNDHPXB5

https://substack.com/@borisbondarev