KYIV, Ukraine — Negotiators from Moscow and Kyiv on Thursday held a second day of U.S.-brokered talks on ending their war, as Russia escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s power grid and the two sides continued their grinding war of attrition.
Russia has hammered Ukraine’s electricity network, aiming to deny civilians power and weaken their appetite for the fight, while fighting continues along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line snaking along eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that 55,000 Ukrainian troops have died since Russia’s invasion almost four years ago. “And there is a large number of people whom Ukraine considers missing,” he added in an interview broadcast by French TV channel France 2 late Wednesday.
The last time Zelenskyy gave a figure for battlefield deaths, in early 2025, he said 46,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed.
The delegations from Moscow and Kyiv were joined Thursday in the capital of the United Arab Emirates by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council chief, who was present at the meeting.
They were also at last month’s talks in the same place as the Trump administration tries to steer the two countries toward a settlement. At the time, Zelenskyy described the issue of who would control the Donbas industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine as “key.”
Officials have provided no information about any progress in the discussions.
General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was also present at the talks, according to a spokesman for the general who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Zelenskyy has repeatedly said his country needs security guarantees from the United States and Europe to deter any postwar Russian attacks.
Ukrainians must feel that there is genuine progress toward peace and “not toward a scenario in which the Russians exploit everything to their advantage and continue their strikes,” Zelenskyy said on social media late Wednesday.
Last year saw a 31% increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties compared with 2024, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a report published Wednesday.
Almost 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and just over 40,000 injured since the start of the war through last December, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk arrived in Kyiv on an official visit Thursday.
Two people were injured in the Ukrainian capital as a result of overnight Russian drone strikes, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. In the wider Kyiv region, a man suffered a shrapnel chest wound, authorities said.
Russia fired 183 drones and two ballistic missiles at Ukraine overnight, according to the Ukrainian air force.
Russian air defenses downed 95 Ukrainian drones overnight over several regions, the Azov Sea and Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2016, Russia’s Defense Ministry said.
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Emma Burrows in London contributed to this report.
