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Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul denounced Russia’s “stubborn insistence on the crucial territorial issue” on Monday following talks between Russian, Ukrainian and US envoys in Abu Dhabi on ending Moscow’s ongoing war in Ukraine.
“What I am hearing and reading today, including from the negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, is only Russia’s stubborn insistence on the crucial territorial issue,” Wadephul said during a visit to Latvia.
“And if there is no flexibility here, I fear that the negotiations may still take a long time or may not be successful at this stage.”
Wadephul welcomed the US-mediated talks but added that it was “clear that Europe must be at the table when decisions are made about the security order of our continent and Russia must know that our commitment to diplomacy does not come at the expense of our determination to support Ukraine.”
Speaking alongside Latvia’s foreign minister, Wadephul stressed that it was “a decisive moment for the future of our European continent.”
“We will only see real peace negotiations if Russia understands that Europe stands united with Ukraine,” he said.
The three-way talks in Abu Dhabi took place on Friday and Saturday and another round is planned for next week, an anonymous US official said.
Working towards peace
Officials revealed few details of the talks, part of a yearlong effort by US President Donald Trump and his administration to negotiate a peace deal and end almost four years of Russia’s all-out war.
Despite Washington’s calls for a compromise, Moscow’s maximalist demands have been seen as the main obstacle so far, which include Moscow retaining control of the Ukrainian territories it has occupied.
Trump has set deadlines for an agreement and threatened additional sanctions on Moscow, but Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently has not budged.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also described the Abu Dhabi talks as constructive, saying on Sunday that a document outlining US security guarantees for Ukraine in a postwar scenario is “100% ready,” although it still needs to be formally signed.
Kyiv has insisted on Washington’s security commitments as part of any broader peace agreement with Moscow after Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and its initial invasion of eastern Ukraine, followed by its full-scale war in February 2022.
Zelenskyy has acknowledged that there are fundamental differences between Ukrainian and Russian positions, although he said last week that peace proposals are “nearly ready”.
Meanwhile, Russia’s grinding war of attrition along the roughly 1,000-kilometre front line snaking through eastern and southern Ukraine has dragged on, and Ukrainian civilians are enduring another winter of hardship after Russian bombardment of cities in the rear.
Russian forces launched 138 drones at Ukraine overnight, 110 of which were shot down or suppressed, Ukraine’s air force said, and 21 of them hit targets in 11 locations.
Additional sources • AP, AFP