Zelenskyy Says Battlefield Gains Strengthen Kyiv's Hand Ahead of US-Led Abu Dhabi Peace Talks

On Monday night, in his regular video address, Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a case that the fighting and the negotiating are the same effort. Every task fully accomplished, he said, and every defensive operation that adds to Ukraine's strength and delivers results, strengthens Ukraine and, above all, its position at the negotiating table. He spoke on the eve of new US-led trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, scheduled for Tuesday.

Zelenskyy said the country's top military commander, Mykhailo Drapatyi, had presented a report underscoring heavy recent losses among Russian forces. He added that Ukraine's long-range strikes on Russian targets, including oil industry sites, were working.

The Guardian's Pjotr Sauer has obtained data that gives a sense of the scale on the Russian side. More than 400,000 Russians have been killed in nearly five years of war, according to material leaked from Rosstat, the state statistics agency. The Belarusian opposition-linked hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian collective Silent Crow obtained it. It contains 412,576 death certificates explicitly tied to the war, either through official cause-of-death codes or written references to combat and military operations. The data indicates losses at a level unprecedented in Russia's modern history.

On the diplomatic track, an American official told Reuters that US negotiators believe Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin may be willing to compromise on territory, each ceding a little. Under the proposed deal, Ukraine would get an end to the war, security guarantees and a roadmap to EU accession. In a 60 Minutes interview broadcast Sunday, Donald Trump said Ukraine would have "a little bit different shape" under a settlement, without elaborating. A senior Ukrainian official strongly denied that the government would consider any such concessions.

Trump said Monday that Washington saw a "very strong inclination" toward ending the war and that both sides were "tired of fighting." Secretary of state Marco Rubio was more sober. The process still has "ways to go," he said, and getting Europeans to the table with the Russians has not happened. "It's been difficult to get anything productive out of that," he told reporters a day before the talks.

Europe's place is the sharpest open question. France, Germany and the European Commission will send officials to Abu Dhabi, but Russia has made clear it does not want Europeans taking part in the negotiations. Ukrainian delegates will instead meet separately to brief European allies. Rustem Umerov, who heads the Ukrainian delegation, said Monday that everything was being done to ensure Europe is a participant in the diplomatic process. At a G7 meeting in Paris, EU foreign ministers pressed Rubio on the same point. German foreign minister Johann Wadephul said afterward: "Europe belongs at this table. There can be no solution without Europe – only with Europe." Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Trump's team had put "collective security," covering a wider area than Russia and Ukraine alone, at the top of the agenda.

The war continued around the diplomacy. Russia's defence ministry said its forces targeted four electrical substations, in the Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Cherkasy and Vinnytsia regions, part of a campaign to deprive Ukrainian civilians of heating, light and running water as winter approaches. Zelenskyy said the EU had agreed to activate a special emergency mechanism that speeds up funding for grid repairs. In Odesa, a Russian strike hit a warehouse holding food supplies for kindergartens and schools, killing three people, local officials said.

Ukraine struck back at Russian industry. A long-range drone attack started a fire at the KINEF oil refinery, one of Russia's largest, near St. Petersburg, according to Leningrad governor Alexander Drozdenko. Ukraine's general staff said its forces also hit a plant near the city that produces solid rocket propellant for Russia's Iskander-M ballistic missiles.

This was day 1,721 of the war. What to watch in Abu Dhabi is whether Europe wins a role beyond being briefed, and whether the strikes on Ukraine's power grid intensify as the cold sets in.