The US and Russia have agreed to re-establish high-level military dialogue for the first time in more than four years in another sign of warming relations between the two countries since US President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office.
High-level military communication was suspended in late 2021 between Washington and Moscow, just months before the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Trump campaigned on bringing the war, nearing its fourth anniversary, to a swift end. Many of his proposals so far have heavily favoured the Kremlin, including requiring Ukraine to cede territory to Russia in any potential ceasefire agreement.
The restored communication channels will “provide a consistent military-to-military contact as the parties continue to work towards a lasting peace”, according to a statement by the US European Command.
The agreement was announced after US and Russian officials held talks in the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi, where trilateral talks involving Ukraine, aimed at ending the war were taking also taking place. The trilateral talks produced a new prisoner swap deal, as well as an agreement on future talks.
The resumption of military hotlines marks an effort to ease tensions that had soared after Moscow launched its war, and to avoid collisions between the United States and Russia.
In one such incident, the US military said it had to ditch an MQ-9 Breacher drone in the Black Sea in March 2023, after a pair of Russian fighter jets dumped fuel on it, and then one of them struck its propeller as it flew in international airspace.
Moscow denied its planes hit the drone, alleging that it had crashed while making a sharp manoeuvre. The Kremling said its forces responded to a violation of a no-fly zone it had established in the area near Crimea.
No breakthrough in Abu Dhabi peace talks
The delegations from Moscow and Kyiv were joined by US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to Rustem Umerov, head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council chief, who was present at the meeting.
Officials have provided no details about any progress in the discussions, in what is the second round of talks to take place in the same location. Delegations from Russia, Ukraine and the US met in Abu Dhabi last month to explore peace options after the conclusion of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
After the talks on Thursday however, Moscow and Kyiv announced that they had reached a prisoner swap deal. The Russian Defence Ministry said it brought 157 captured servicemen, as well as three Russian nationals from Ukraine, captured during Kyiv’s incursion in the Russian Kursk region in August 2024.
Ukraine said that in return it has received 150 service members who returned from Russian captivity. Kyiv said that overall, the released servicemen were in “difficult psychological conditions”, adding that some were even critically underweight.
Zelenskyy demands security guarantees
The exchange comes as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that 55,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed in combat during the course of Russia’s invasion. The last time the Ukrainian leader provided an exact figure was early in 2025, where he shared that 46,000 soldiers were killed.
He also added that there is a large number of people whom Ukraine considers missing, many of them civilians, a figure that correlates with a recent report published by the Human Rights Watch, which detailed that Russian operations targeting or killing civilians have risen by 31% last year.
Almost 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and just over 40,000 were wounded since the start of the war through to December 2025, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy has repeatedly said his country needs security guarantees from the US and Europe to deter any postwar Russian attacks.
Ukrainians must feel that there is genuine progress towards peace and “not towards a scenario in which the Russians exploit everything to their advantage and continue their strikes,” Zelenskyy wrote on social media late on Wednesday.
Additional sources • AP