Zelenskyy Says Next Russia-Ukraine Trilateral Talks Set for Feb. 4-5 in Abu Dhabi

On Sunday morning, Russian attack drones hit a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine. Ukraine's emergency service said three women were wounded and a fire broke out in the gynaecology reception area. It was later put out. The strike came on a day when envoys from Russia, Ukraine and the United States had been expected to meet in Abu Dhabi to keep working on an end to Moscow's all-out invasion.

That meeting was not the news of the day. Instead, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in a Telegram post that his negotiating team had just reported back and that dates for the next trilateral meetings were fixed: February 4 and 5, again in Abu Dhabi. He said Ukraine is ready for substantive talks and wants an outcome that brings it closer to a real and dignified end to the war. There was no immediate comment from US or Russian officials.

On Saturday afternoon, Kirill Dmitriev, Russia's top envoy, said he had held a constructive meeting with the US peacemaking delegation in Florida. Beyond that, officials have shared few details of the Abu Dhabi discussions. Those talks are part of a yearlong effort by the Trump administration to push both sides toward a deal after almost four years of full-scale war.

The obstacle is not a lack of agreement in principle. Ukrainian and Russian officials have both accepted Washington's calls for compromise. But Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on what a settlement would look like. The central question is territory: whether Russia keeps the areas of Ukraine its forces have occupied or withdraws from them, particularly in the Donbas, Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland, and whether Russia should also be given land there that it has not yet captured.

The fighting has continued alongside the diplomacy. Days earlier, President Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin had agreed to temporarily stop targeting the Ukrainian capital and other cities, while freezing temperatures bring widespread hardship across the country. The Kremlin confirmed on Friday that it had agreed to hold off striking Kyiv until Sunday, but gave no details, which makes it hard to assess independently whether the pause actually took hold.

In the past week, Russia has struck energy assets in Odesa in the south and Kharkiv in the northeast. On Wednesday it hit the Kyiv region, killing two people and injuring four. Overnight into Sunday, Ukraine's air force said, Russia launched 90 attack drones, 14 of which struck nine locations.

The human toll from that night is already visible. A woman and a man were killed in a drone strike in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, according to Oleksandr Hanzha, head of the local administration. In Kherson, in the south, Russian shelling hit the city centre shortly after 7 am local time and seriously wounded a 59-year-old woman, the municipal military administration said on Facebook.

The next test is Wednesday and Thursday in Abu Dhabi. With so little disclosed about earlier rounds and the territorial question still unresolved, the thing to watch is whether either side puts anything concrete on the table, and whether the strikes on Ukrainian cities ease or continue while the delegations meet.