The first trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States since February opened in Abu Dhabi on 10 November 2026, with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff leading the American delegation, Vladimir Medinsky leading Russia's team and Rustem Umerov heading Ukraine's. The BBC, The Guardian, AP and CBS News described an agenda centred on a post-war security architecture, low expectations of a breakthrough, and continued fighting around the talks. On that evidence the original fact-check concluded the post was misleading, because the headline proposals it described were not confirmed and Russia did not look ready to stop shooting.
That conclusion has to change. The Economist reported on 9 November, citing people involved in the negotiations, that US negotiators had floated redrawing the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions so that Moscow could formally claim the whole of the Donbas while Kyiv kept the fortified cities its forces still hold. Meduza, Hromadske and NV all relayed the same account on 10 November. That is the specific border-redraw plan the post described, and it is no longer an unsupported detail.
The energy element is also now on the record. According to the same reporting, American envoys raised the restoration of Russian fossil fuel access to European markets as a sweetener to bring Putin to a deal, an idea that clashes with the EU's existing embargo on Russian hydrocarbons and that Ukrainian and European officials have publicly rejected. One senior Ukrainian official told The Economist's reporters that Kyiv would never agree to this while the war is ongoing. So the post's second bullet is substantially borne out, even if it describes a floated concession rather than an agreed plan.
The security-guarantee and military-limits passage is broadly consistent with what the outlets describe, though with a small attribution wrinkle. It was US negotiators, not NATO as an institution, who suggested Putin might accept bilateral American commitments modelled on NATO's Article 4 or Article 5, and Ukrainian officials doubt Trump would honour such a pact. Moscow has shown no sign of accepting a multinational peacekeeping force on Ukrainian soil and has not dropped demands that Kyiv declare neutrality and sharply cut its army — exactly the deadlock the post points to.
The final bullet is the weakest in tone but not baseless. The Economist's sources described "unusual flexibility" from Moscow, particularly over a ceasefire along the current front lines. The catch, which the post leaves out, is that this shift appeared only after Washington widened the talks to broader European security arrangements, and US officials now worry Russia could use those talks to stall while the fighting continues. Ukrainian negotiators also doubt Moscow is ready for a full peace deal before its winter campaign ends.
Taken together, the post takes real, now-reported negotiating positions and presents them as breaking details. The proposals themselves hold up; what does not fully hold up is the confident framing about Russian willingness and the implication that the outlines are settled. That is why the verdict moves from misleading to mostly true rather than fully supported.
