Abu Dhabi talks signal a major shift in the Ukraine peace process

The trilateral talks on Ukraine in Abu Dhabi have prompted mixed reactions, but most observers advise against expecting a breakthrough. The delegations may be senior, but their discussions are essentially technical, plus they can’t make political decisions, and the positions publicly maintained by Moscow and Kiev still offer little room for compromise.

Yet there’s a shared recognition that the talks are serious and more importantly, perhaps for the first time since the conflict began, the question of Europe’s wider security architecture, and the guarantees it would require, has moved to the center of negotiations, so that alone is a significant change.

To appreciate its importance, we should look back five years. In November 2021, President Vladimir Putin instructed the Russian Foreign Ministry to raise Europe’s security arrangements with NATO. Moscow had never regarded the post-Cold War, NATO-centred order as satisfactory and successive rounds of enlargement had gradually transformed Russian unease into a conviction that the bloc posed a direct threat.

The Foreign Ministry subsequently presented proposals for revising that order, but talks in January 2022 demonstrated how far apart the sides were. The Americans and Western Europeans were unwilling to entertain Moscow’s central proposition, which was that the existing security system needed fundamental change because, as far as they were concerned, there was no problem to solve.

What happened next is well known and at the time, Washington and the Western European capitals spoke with one voice, but five years later, something unexpected has happened in that a different American administration now acknowledges that security guarantees for all sides are indispensable to resolving the Ukraine crisis, and is prepared to discuss them in Abu Dhabi.