In brief: Russia’s demands after the Abu Dhabi talks show no retreat from its pursuit of Ukrainian capitulation, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Moscow is demanding territory beyond Donbas, rejecting land swaps, and repeating calls for Ukraine to abandon NATO membership, while using exaggerated battlefield claims to strengthen its negotiating position, the analysts said.
Russia continues to demand Ukrainian territorial concessions far beyond Donbas and shows no willingness to compromise, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its assessment on Wednesday, Nov. 11, following negotiations in Abu Dhabi.
The US-based think tank’s assessment said senior Kremlin officials had explicitly reaffirmed demands amounting to Ukraine’s capitulation, despite renewed US-mediated efforts to negotiate an end to the war.
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Vladimir Medinsky, the Kremlin aide who led Russia’s delegation, told Russian media that Moscow would capture “every inch of [Russia’s] land one way or another.”
He also claimed that “wherever a Russian soldier has set foot belongs to Russia,” according to ISW.
Medinsky rejected territorial exchanges with Ukraine and said Russia would continue expanding what it calls a “security zone.”
ISW assessed that the latter statement most likely referred to areas of the northern Sumy and Kharkiv regions that Moscow describes as a buffer zone.
The analysts said these remarks demonstrate territorial ambitions extending beyond even the Ukrainian regions Russia has already claimed to annex illegally: Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
Lavrov repeats Putin’s demands from 2024
On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov separately said that Moscow would continue pursuing the demands Putin outlined in June 2024.
Those conditions require Ukrainian forces to withdraw from the entire Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, including areas Russian troops have never occupied.
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Donetsk and Luhansk together form Donbas. The additional demands concerning Zaporizhzhia and Kherson underline the wider geographic scope of Moscow’s conditions.
Putin’s demands also include Ukraine abandoning its NATO aspirations, demilitarization, and what the Kremlin calls “denazification.”
ISW interprets the latter demand as seeking to replace Ukraine’s government with a pro-Russian administration.
The institute noted that Kremlin officials have repeatedly treated Ukraine’s withdrawal from Donetsk as a necessary but insufficient condition for a settlement.
ISW says Moscow promotes a fictional battlefield picture
Russian representatives also used the Abu Dhabi talks to try to persuade American and Ukrainian negotiators to accept an exaggerated account of Russia’s battlefield position, ISW said.
The institute cited Zelensky’s account that Russian officials claimed to control roughly half of the Donbas territory that actually remains under Ukrainian control.
Zelensky said American negotiators backed Ukraine’s assessment of the battlefield.
ISW warned that Moscow would likely continue inflating its claimed advances to establish a fictional front line as the starting point for future territorial negotiations. The analysts described this as an attempt to make Russia’s preferred account of the war shape the concessions demanded from Kyiv.
Ukraine has already rejected a reported proposal to redraw Donbas administrative boundaries so Russia could claim it had obtained the entire region without capturing the remaining Ukrainian-held cities.
Zelensky rejects concessions ahead of Moscow meeting
Speaking in Dublin on Wednesday, Zelensky again ruled out surrendering Donbas, saying Ukraine could not be expected to leave its sovereign territory to end the war.
He said American negotiators frequently raised the issue but stressed that progress depended on Washington’s willingness to pressure Russia.
Zelensky also said Russian representatives in Abu Dhabi lacked authority to answer proposals for halting attacks on energy facilities, critical infrastructure, and targets at sea.
US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were scheduled to meet Putin in Moscow on Thursday, before meeting Zelensky in Dublin.
The Abu Dhabi negotiations produced different assessments of progress. Ukrainian delegation leader Rustem Umerov highlighted advances on security and economic recovery, while Kushner acknowledged that territorial questions remained the hardest obstacle.
The sides also agreed to prepare a large-scale prisoner exchange. Possible formats discussed included releasing 1,000 or 1,500 prisoners from each side, with the final numbers still subject to agreement when the talks concluded.
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