By RFE/RL
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a new round of trilateral talks with Moscow and Washington is set for February 4-5 in the United Arab Emirates, with the gathering coming after another round of deadly Russian air strikes on civilian sites.
In his nightly video address on February 1, Zelenskyy said there is “an arrangement to hold a trilateral meeting at an appropriate level…on Wednesday and Thursday in the United Arab Emirates, as last time.”
There had been uncertainty about the talks, which originally were scheduled to take place in the UAE capital on February 1. Zelenskyy on January 31 said his team was ready for such negotiations but that he was awaiting word from the United States.
“I have scheduled a meeting for [February 2] with Rustem Umerov,” Zelenskyy said, referring to Kyiv’s main negotiator.
The Ukrainian leaders aim “to agree on the framework of the [Abu Dhabi] talks and prepare everything. On the evening of [February 2], the team will already be en route to the negotiations.”
“February will be a period of quite intense foreign policy activity on our part, with contacts and meetings beginning tomorrow,” Zelenskyy added.
“We expect that the American side will be just as active, and in particular this applies to de-escalation measures — reducing strikes. And much depends on what the American side will succeed in, so that people trust both the process and the results, of course,” he added.
US and Russian officials did not immediately comment on Zelenskyy’s remarks.
Follow-Up Talks
Direct negotiations involving Moscow and Kyiv, 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 of February 2022.
On January 30, US special envoy Steve Witkoff met 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 Florida talks.
However, despite what US officials saw as a positive dynamic in renewed diplomatic efforts, Russian air strikes continued to pound civilian infrastructure and logistics across Ukraine, as temperatures in the country dropped to as low as 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, injuring at least seven others.
Russia Strikes Ukraine After Trump Says Putin Agreed To Week-Long Halt
Sixteen people were killed when a Russian drone struck near a bus in the Pavlohrad area, while two more died after a drone hit a private house in the region’s capital, Dnipro, earlier in the day
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private utilities company, which owned the bus, added that those killed in the Pavlohrad area were miners returning from their shift.
Details of attacks cannot immediately be independently verified.
Maternity Hospital Blasted
Separately, there were ongoing air raids in the neighboring city of Zaporizhzhya, which began shortly after midnight. Regional governor Ivan Fedorov said that 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 impact. In a Telegram post showing the aftermath, he described the strike as “yet another proof of a war directed against life.”
He later added that a secondary attack on the city, which lies less than 50 kilometers from the country’s southern front line, injured three more people in another neighborhood. The regional governor said that a small boy was among them.
The continuation of attacks came after Trump on January 29 said Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally promised him to pause air strikes on the capital and other “various towns” for a week.
Katarina Mathernova, the EU ambassador to Ukraine, blasted the Kremlin’s latest actions in a Facebook posting.
“Is this what a ‘cease-fire’ is supposed to look like?” she said. “Like explosions.
Like dead civilians. Like destroyed energy and transport infrastructure.”
“All of this is happening at a time when the world is talking about a potential cease-fire,” she added.
