Ukrainian and Russian officials have wrapped up a "productive" first day of new US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi as fighting in Europe's biggest conflict since World War II rages on.
The two-day trilateral meetings come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had exploited a US-backed energy truce last week to stockpile munitions, attacking Ukraine with a record number of ballistic missiles.
"The work was substantive and productive, focused on concrete steps and practical solutions," Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, wrote on social media platform X.
A US official, who offered comment on condition of anonymity, also called the talks productive and said they would continue on Thursday morning.
Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said it was critical for the talks to lead to real peace and not offer Russia a new opportunity to continue the war. Ukraine's partners, he said, had to exert more pressure on Moscow.
"It must be felt now. People in Ukraine must feel that the situation is genuinely moving toward peace and the end of the war, not toward Russia using everything to its advantage and continuing attacks," Zelenskiy said.
Zelenskiy also said Ukraine expected the talks to lead to a new prisoner exchange soon.
The president, interviewed by French television channel France 2, said the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed on the battlefield as a result of the war with Russia was estimated at 55,000.
Zelenskiy had previously cited a figure of more than 46,000 Ukrainian servicemen killed in an interview with US television network NBC in February 2025.
Shortly after the talks began on Wednesday, local time, Russian forces struck a crowded market in eastern Ukraine with cluster munitions, killing at least seven people and wounding 15, the Donetsk region's governor Vadym Filashkin said.
Photographs released earlier in the day by the United Arab Emirates' foreign ministry showed the three delegations sitting around a U-shaped table, with US officials seated at the centre, including special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In Paris, diplomatic sources said French President Emmanuel Macron's most senior diplomat, Emmanuel Bonne, met Russian officials in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
One of the sources said the aim was to have dialogue on key issues, most importantly Ukraine, but did not give details beyond that.
Trump's administration has pushed both Kyiv and Moscow to find a compromise to end the four-year-old war, but the two sides remain far apart on key points despite several rounds of talks with US officials.
"The good news is that for the first time in a very long time, we have technical military teams from both Ukraine and Russia meeting in a forum that we'll also be involved in with our experts," US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Washington on Wednesday.
"I don't want to say talks alone is progress, but it's good that there's engagement going on."
The most sensitive issues are Moscow's demands that Kyiv give up land it still controls and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, which sits in a Russian-occupied area.
Moscow wants Kyiv to pull its troops out of all the Donetsk region, including heavily fortified cities regarded as one of Ukraine's strongest defences, as a precondition for any deal.
Ukraine said the conflict should be frozen along current front lines and rejects any unilateral pullback of its forces.
