Europe wins a seat at Ukraine peace talks as envoys announce prisoner exchange

European governments will sit at the next round of US-mediated talks on ending Russia's war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky and US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff said on Thursday, Nov. 12, after the two envoys met Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The announcement, made at a military airbase outside Dublin, coincided with an agreement on what could become the largest prisoner-of-war exchange since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. Zelensky said it could bring more than a thousand Ukrainians home; negotiators had discussed exchanging either 1,000 or 1,500 prisoners from each side during the Abu Dhabi meetings.

"All the sides accepted that Europe will get [a seat at the] negotiation table," Zelensky said, describing European participation as direct rather than limited to separate consultations. Kushner said Washington had spent months working with European partners: "We cannot conclude this deal without the Europeans being at the table."

Kushner said the US delegation raised the question with Putin, who indicated a willingness to accept European involvement. "He's going to give it a try," Kushner said. Witkoff told Russian state television that European representatives would attend the next round; the Kremlin had not formally confirmed the arrangement.

Zelensky said the next agenda would cover ceasefires and de-escalation measures. "Each meeting has to give results and bring us closer to peace," he said. Of the exchange he added: "Our soldiers will come home. This is a real result."

The gaps remain wide. Putin rejected proposals for demilitarised or "grey" zones separating the two armies. "For us, there is only one line of demarcation: the state border," he said in a televised exchange with the US delegation in Moscow. He also said Moscow would consider foreign peacekeeping troops legitimate military targets, describing their deployment as a continuation of the war. Russia claims Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which Moscow declared annexed in 2022, a decade after its annexation of Crimea. Zelensky has ruled out territorial concessions.

Witkoff said another meeting was scheduled but gave no location or timing. He said the delegation had "another meeting on the schedule" and would "work very, very hard to get to that goal."