Ukraine, Russia and the United States will hold a new round of talks in Abu Dhabi on February 4–5, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has confirmed, as diplomacy cautiously resumes nearly four years into the war.
The meeting follows an initial round in late January that ended without a breakthrough on core issues such as territory, with Moscow still demanding that Kyiv cede additional land in eastern Ukraine, a condition Ukraine continues to reject. Zelenskiy said Kyiv is ready for “substantive” discussions that bring the country closer to what he called a “real and dignified” peace.
The renewed talks come as a brutal cold snap exposes the weakness of Ukraine’s energy grid after repeated Russian strikes. In Kyiv, a major system failure on Saturday cut power to parts of the country and left almost 3,500 apartment blocks temporarily without heating, with about 700 high rises still without heat on Sunday.
Authorities did not directly link the disruption to a fresh attack, but the outage, which also caused power cuts in neighbouring Moldova, underlined how fragile the interconnected network remains. With temperatures in Kyiv around minus 15 degrees Celsius and forecast to drop below minus 20, grid operator Ukrenergo has imposed rolling blackouts nationwide to stabilise supply.
According to the Kremlin, Russia paused strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure until Sunday at the request of U.S. President Donald Trump, and Kyiv said it would reciprocate, expecting the pause to last until the following Friday. Zelenskiy, however, accused Moscow of continuing efforts “to destroy logistics and connectivity” with ongoing attacks on other targets.
Overnight, a Russian drone strike killed two people in the city of Dnipro, while nine others were injured in separate attacks on a maternity hospital and a residential area in Zaporizhzhia, local officials reported. Private energy company DTEK said it had restored electricity to about 300,000 customers in the Odesa region after the latest grid problems.
Ukraine’s energy ministry said the country imported a record 41.987 gigawatt hours of electricity in a single day in January to support the strained system. On Kyiv’s streets, some residents voiced scepticism about the talks even as they endured the cold, with one 65 year old army veteran insisting Ukraine must still “fight and secure victory” regardless of any diplomatic moves.
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