By Ephraim Agbo
The trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi were framed as a diplomatic inflection point—a rare convergence of Ukraine, Russia, and the United States at a moment of war fatigue and mounting global pressure. Instead, they exposed something more sobering: not the failure of diplomacy, but its confinement within a conflict whose underlying logic remains unchanged. What unfolded was not a near-miss for peace, but a textbook illustration of structural deadlock—where negotiations exist, yet resolution remains structurally impossible.
An examination of the positions, strategies, and signaling behaviors of the three principal actors reveals a negotiation process functioning less as a bridge to peace and more as a parallel theatre of war.
The Unbridgeable Chasm: Existential Positions at the Table
At the heart of the stalemate lies a collision of claims that each side defines not as negotiable interests, but as matters of national survival.
Territory as Identity, Not Bargaining Chip
The Donbas remains the immovable core of the dispute. Russia’s demand that Ukraine withdraw fully from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts is not framed as a compromise position but as a prerequisite for talks to have meaning. For Moscow, these territories are now rhetorically and administratively absorbed into the Russian state.
For Kyiv, the demand is existentially unacceptable. Any formal cession would represent not merely territorial loss but the collapse of the post-1945 norm against conquest by force. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s description of Ukraine’s current frontlines as “written in blood” is not rhetorical excess—it reflects a political reality in which retreat would invalidate the sacrifice that underpins state legitimacy. These positions are not two ends of a spectrum; they are parallel lines that do not meet.
Security Architectures That Cancel Each Other Out
The second fault line concerns the post-war order itself. Ukraine seeks binding, enforceable security guarantees—preferably from the United States—precisely because past assurances proved hollow. Russia, meanwhile, rejects any framework that embeds Western military power on Ukrainian soil, viewing it as the very condition that precipitated the war.
The contradiction is absolute: Ukraine’s security is imagined through Western anchoring; Russia’s security is imagined through Ukraine’s strategic neutrality or subordination. Any arrangement satisfying one side negates the other.
The Politics of Retroactive Agreements
Complicating matters further is Moscow’s repeated invocation of prior diplomatic understandings—often referred to by Russian officials as the “Anchorage Formula”—to suggest that Ukrainian territorial concessions were tacitly accepted by major powers earlier in the war. Kyiv contests both the substance and legitimacy of such claims, arguing that its sovereignty cannot be negotiated in absentia.
This ambiguity is not accidental. It allows Russia to frame Ukrainian resistance as bad faith while positioning itself as merely enforcing previously agreed realities. Diplomatically, it muddies the waters; politically, it delegitimizes Ukrainian agency.
Force as Language: The Synchronization of Diplomacy and Escalation
A defining feature of this negotiation phase is the seamless fusion of military pressure with diplomatic engagement.
Talks Under Fire
The coincidence of major aerial assaults with diplomatic meetings is not logistical happenstance. It is signaling. By escalating during talks, Russia reinforces the message that negotiations occur under coercive conditions—that battlefield realities, not diplomatic goodwill, set the parameters of discussion. Diplomacy, in this framing, does not restrain force; force disciplines diplomacy.
The Illusion of De-Escalation
Temporary pauses—such as the limited reduction in strikes on energy infrastructure—were presented as gestures of restraint. Yet their narrowly defined timelines and conditional framing revealed their true nature: tactical pauses, not confidence-building measures. Each side interpreted the pause through its own narrative, underscoring the absence of shared meaning, let alone trust.
Without a mutually agreed framework for ceasefire verification or enforcement, such gestures function less as steps toward peace and more as probes—tests of response, resilience, and international reaction.
Civilian Suffering as Strategic Variable
The sustained targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure during winter has produced humanitarian crises with predictable regularity. Strategically, this is not collateral—it is instrumental. By straining civilian endurance, draining state capacity, and increasing dependence on Western assistance, such attacks aim to alter Kyiv’s political calculus and test the patience of its allies.
The civilian population becomes not merely a victim of war, but a pressure point within it.
The Mediator’s Dilemma: Power, Alignment, and Constraint
The United States occupies an inherently conflicted role—simultaneously Ukraine’s principal military backer and the primary broker of negotiations.
Asymmetry Beneath Alliance
Ukraine’s dependence on U.S. military, financial, and intelligence support creates an unavoidable asymmetry. While Washington publicly affirms Ukraine’s sovereignty, its mediation is shaped by broader considerations: escalation management, alliance cohesion, domestic political constraints, and global strategic bandwidth.
This does not imply betrayal, but divergence. The mediator’s optimal outcome—managed containment, stability without rupture—does not always align with the maximalist war aims of the party whose survival is directly at stake.
Irreconcilable Endstates
The negotiations falter not because of poor diplomacy, but because the endstates envisioned by the parties cannot coexist. When sovereignty, national identity, and regime legitimacy are defined in absolute terms, compromise ceases to be politically survivable. Talks then serve a different purpose: buying time, shaping narratives, and positioning for advantage when conditions change.
Diplomacy as Continuation, Not Alternative
In this context, diplomacy does not replace warfare; it extends it by other means. Negotiations become tools for signaling resolve, managing international optics, and testing fault lines—while the battlefield continues to define reality. Peace talks, paradoxically, become one more front.
Conclusion: The Enduring Logic of Attrition
The Abu Dhabi talks did not fail. They functioned exactly as the structure of the conflict allows. In wars defined by existential stakes and zero-sum claims, diplomacy without a decisive shift in power rarely produces resolution. It produces stalemate management.
Absent a fundamental change—whether through battlefield developments, shifts in global political will, or internal pressures within one of the belligerents—the negotiations will remain performative rather than transformative. They will manage the war’s tempo, not its termination.
The grim implication is clear: the eventual contours of any settlement will be shaped less by conference tables than by the cumulative realities of attrition. In the Ukraine war, diplomacy may set the language of peace—but the battlefield continues to write its terms.
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