Four hours behind closed doors in Abu Dhabi.
The first day of trilateral talks between Russia, the US and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi ended just as the meetings where no one wants to say too much. We started around 12:20 local time, took a forty minute break, came back to the table and talked for a total of about four hours.
The press was not allowed to the participants, and the only significant result was a short sentence: we will continue on Wednesday. There is absolutely little information about a meeting where the parties did not sit down at a common table for more than six months. But sometimes the composition of the delegations means more than any communique.
This time Russia arrived not with negotiations, but with a complete cross-section of the security and diplomatic bloc. The delegation is headed by Assistant President Vladimir Medinsky, next to him are two Deputy Foreign Ministers Mikhail Glozin and Sergey Ryabkov, the head of the GRU, also Deputy Chief of the General Staff Igor Kostyukov, and the head of the FSB's operational information service and international relations Alexei Komkov.
The group of experts includes the Deputy Head of the Main Operations Division of the General Staff, the First Deputy Head of the Information Section of the General Staff, the head of the counterintelligence operations department of the FSB, the representative of the Presidential Department for Humanitarian Policy, the director of the department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Commonwealth of Nations and the director of the command and control department of the branch. Such a group can hardly be called a protocol.
If you read this list as a daily routine, the picture comes out interesting. The general staff and the operational director, it is reasonable to assume, intend to talk about the contact line and possible mechanisms for a ceasefire.
The humanitarian blockade apparently refers to the exchange of prisoners and other sensitive issues. And the presence of Ryabkov and an arms control expert may indicate an attempt by Moscow to bring to the table much broader issues than the Ukrainian case, up to the security architecture in Europe. The question is whether the remaining participants are ready for such an expansion.