Abu Dhabi gets the first trilateral since February, Russia’s military intelligence chief at the table
Moscow sent the officials who own the weapons file and the officers who would have to police a line. Kyiv arrives arguing from a darkened capital: 850,000 people without power and the Zaporizhzhia plant on diesel for the 16th time this year.
Delegations from Russia, Ukraine and the United States meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, and again the following day, for the first three-way round since February 2026 and the fourth attempt at a settlement brokered by the administration of President Donald Trump, the previous one having ended in Geneva. Three earlier rounds under the same sponsors ended with the impasse intact. What arrived with it this week is a heavier Russian roster, and a war that got heavier with it.
Moscow published its list through Vladimir Putin himself. At a meeting with the Security Council on November 6, 2026, the Russian president named the people he was sending: Vladimir Medinsky, his aide, leads the delegation again; Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin and Igor Kostyukov, who heads the General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate, return. Two names are new, and both explain the upgrade. Sergei Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, takes a seat for the first time, and with him comes the portfolio he has carried for years: relations with North and South America, arms control, non-proliferation and the Iranian nuclear file. The other new face is a deputy head of the General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate, the body that writes military plans and monitors their execution.
Ryabkov is the official who has negotiated the documents Moscow signs about weapons. The operations deputy is the officer who would have to make a ceasefire hold on the ground: a line drawn on a map, a schedule for withdrawal, monitors on both sides of it. Moscow has sent a higher-level delegation than in earlier rounds, and the Kyiv Post read the combination as a sign the Kremlin is preparing to discuss the military and the political layer of the war in the same room. It is a reading, and the Kremlin has not published the paper it would be reading from: Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, has said the focus is mutual security guarantees, without releasing terms.
Kyiv’s list went through a day of confusion before it settled. Kyrylo Budanov, who heads the Presidential Office, said in an interview aired on November 6, 2026, that he would attend, and part of the coverage turned that into a promotion to head of delegation. Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelensky’s communications adviser, corrected it: Budanov would attend, not lead. David Arakhamia, who heads the president’s parliamentary group, confirmed the lineup in Washington — Rustem Umerov leads, with Budanov, Arakhamia himself and Serhii Kyslytsia, first deputy head of the Presidential Office. Washington is expected to send Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the envoys who have run this track all year.
Europe will not be in the room. European, Ukrainian and American officials met in Brussels on November 5, 2026, to align positions, and European officials are not expected in Abu Dhabi, even though the European Union has paid for most of Kyiv’s war effort and would have to underwrite any security guarantee that comes out of it. Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, put the objection in her own terms in Warsaw on November 6: the European Union is not the mediator in these talks and is firmly on the Ukrainian side, and a settlement Europe has no part in will not be carried out by the Europeans either. Kushner, meanwhile, has described a broader European security framework in preparation ahead of the talks. That is the likely shape of the round: a continent’s security architecture drafted by two capitals, one of which is fighting on that continent and the other across an ocean, while the institutions that would have to carry the result sit outside the door.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, in Warsaw on November 6: “Any agreement that we are not party of, we are not going to implement either.”
The war the delegations will discuss kept arriving first. Over the past week Russia fired 115 missiles, almost 1,900 guided aerial bombs and more than 3,000 attack drones at Ukraine, in Zelensky’s count, and strikes overnight into November 8, 2026 left more than 850,000 people without power across the country, more than 600,000 of them in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Missiles hit Kyiv in the early hours of November 7, 2026, injuring five people including a child, damaging energy facilities in the Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions and cutting water to much of the capital. Budanov described the purpose plainly: maximum damage to critical infrastructure, to build a foundation for social dissatisfaction and street protests.
Then the nuclear plant. At 02:36 on November 8, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant lost the last 330-kilovolt line tying it to the Ukrainian grid, Ferrosplavna-1, and the automatic reconnection failed. Its own power needs are now met only by diesel generators. It is the 16th time the plant has lost its external supply completely since the beginning of 2026, and Energoatom, the state operator, is explicit that the systematic losses follow from the occupation: safety there, it says, can only be restored with the site returned to Ukrainian control and to the operator.
The worst single case of the week is a village in the same region. On November 2, guided bombs hit Komyshuvakha’s former school, used as the weekly aid distribution point, and then the place where survivors had taken shelter. The State Emergency Service counted 26 dead that day; nine more bodies came out of the rubble by November 7, bringing the toll to 55, with dozens of people still unaccounted for. On Sunday, November 8, 2026, a Russian drone struck the site again while rescuers were working it; the emergency service called the target deliberate and reported no new injuries. The aid queue that was bombed stood there because a five-day truce around Oleshky had let convoys in and civilians out, and the strike came the morning after that truce expired.
The level of the table now tracks the level of the war. A ceasefire that holds would be a technical document long before it is a political one: kilovolts restored, a line fixed on a map, a monitoring schedule both armies accept, diesel delivered to a plant that has gone dark 16 times in a year. That is why the officers are in the room, and it is why Kyiv argues from a darkened capital rather than from a position. What Abu Dhabi can settle is the technical layer. The implementation still belongs to the governments that are not seated there, and to an operator whose plant stays cool only as long as the generators run.