Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a new round of trilateral talks with Moscow and Washington is scheduled for February 4-5 in the United Arab Emirates, as the meeting comes after another round of deadly Russian air strikes on civilian targets.
In his late-night video address on February 1, Zelensky said there was “an agreement to hold a trilateral meeting at an appropriate level… on Wednesday and Thursday in the United Arab Emirates, like last time.”
There was uncertainty surrounding the talks, which were initially scheduled to be held in the Emirati capital on February 1. Zelensky on January 31 said his team was ready for such negotiations but was waiting for a response from the United States.
“I have scheduled a meeting for [February 2] with Rustem Umerov,” Zelensky said, referring to Kiev’s chief negotiator.
Ukrainian leaders aim to “agree on the framework for the talks [in Abu Dhabi] and prepare everything. By the evening of [February 2], the team will already be on its way to the negotiations.”
“February will be a period of quite intense foreign policy activity on our part, with contacts and meetings starting tomorrow,” Zelensky added.
“We expect the American side to be just as active, and this especially applies to de-escalation measures, reducing attacks. And a lot depends on what the American side will achieve, so that people trust both the process and the results, of course,” he added.
American and Russian officials did not immediately comment on Zelensky’s statements.
Subsequent talks
Direct negotiations involving Moscow and Kiev, along with US representatives, resumed in Abu Dhabi on January 23–24. Meetings between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators have been rare since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
On January 30, US special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Kremlin negotiator Kirill Dmitriev in Miami for what he described as “productive and constructive meetings.”
Witkoff said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and government adviser Josh Gruenbaum also participated in the talks in Florida.
However, despite what US officials saw as a positive dynamic in renewed diplomatic efforts, Russian airstrikes continued to hit civilian and logistical infrastructure across Ukraine, while temperatures in the country dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius.
Ukrainian officials reported on February 1 that two separate drone strikes killed at least 18 people in Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, wounding at least seven others.
Sixteen people were killed when a Russian drone struck near a bus in the Pavlohrad area, while two others lost their lives after a drone hit a private house in the regional capital, Dnipro, earlier in the day.
DTEK, the largest private energy services company in Ukraine, which owned the bus, added that the people killed in the Pavlohrad area were miners returning from their work shift.
Details of the attacks could not immediately be independently verified.
A maternity hospital is hit
Separately, there were continued air strikes in the neighboring city of Zaporizhia, which began shortly after midnight. The regional governor, Ivan Fedorov, said at least six people were injured in the attack on a maternity hospital.
Fedorov added that two of the injured women were undergoing medical examinations at the time of the attack. In a Telegram post detailing the aftermath, he described the attack as “yet another piece of evidence of a war directed against life.”
He later added that a second attack on the town, which is less than 50 kilometers from the country’s southern front line, wounded three more people in another neighborhood. The regional governor said a young boy was among the wounded.
The resumption of attacks came after Trump said on January 29 that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally promised him that he would halt airstrikes on the capital and other “various cities” for a week.
Katarina Mathernova, the EU ambassador to Ukraine, sharply criticized the Kremlin’s recent actions in a Facebook post.
“Is this what a ‘ceasefire’ should look like?” she said. “Like explosions. Like dead civilians. Like destroyed energy and transportation infrastructure.”
“All of this is happening at a time when the world is talking about a possible ceasefire,” she added
