If the Abu Dhabi negotiations start, they’ll be the first REAL negotiations about the Ukraine war.

10 November 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

A pro-forma first meeting of the Abu Dhabi negotiations to end the war in Ukraine was held on November 10th, but the actual negotiations will start on November 11th. The following pertains to that negotiation if it will occur:

“Russian Hardliners Will Shock Kushner and Witkoff”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAUsEmVA_yw

10 November 2026

ALEX CHRISTOFOROU: All right, Alexander, let’s talk about the diplomacy around Project Ukraine. What uh what are your thoughts with the latest news of Russia’s negotiating team? Uh Ryabkov maybe at uh at the Abu Dhabi talks and uh and we also have uh Budanov back on the Ukraine negotiating team. He will join Umerov. And uh from the US side of things, I guess it’s going to be Witkoff and Kushner, I guess, who are going to be in Abu Dhabi if the Abu Dhabi talks take place because we have uh a possibility that there could be a resumption in the conflict with uh with Iran. So maybe those talks might get canceled, but it looks like they’re on track for the time being. And uh and your thoughts as to what is happening. We also have the Europeans by the way uh France’s foreign minister Barrot who is saying that they will be at the negotiations. I don’t know if they’ll be in the negotiations just like like a seat at the table or if they will be outside in the lobby waiting for for the uh for the negotiations to to conclude. And uh anyway, that’s the that’s the European side of things. They’re really desperate to get a seat at the table. >> ALEXANDER MERCOURIS:  Absolutely. Let’s let’s start with the Russian negotiating team because Putin brought them all together uh for a meeting with the security council. Just to remind our viewers, the security council is the top policy making body in Russia. Putin chairs it but all the top people in Russia are members and its remit covers not just security, foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy. It covers everything. It is in other words the major cabinet if you like um of uh the Russian government. So he brought them he brought them to the uh security council. He introduced them to the security council. He said this is our negotiating team. If you want to ask them questions and to agree the diplomatic and strategy that we’re going to have when we go to Abu Dhabi, you’re welcome to put questions to them. And the result is that we know who are part of the negotiating team on the Russian side. And it is an exceptionally strong negotiating team, the strongest the Russians have put together in all of the negotiations we have seen so far that began in February 2022 after the start of the special military operation. And we’ve discussed many times in many programs that this whole business of doing all of these negotiations with eccentric individuals, unusual individuals like Witkoff and Kushner and Dimitri is problematic to say the least. That it a proper negotiation should involve the foreign ministry and the defense ministry and professional diplomats and professional military people. Well, we have now a negotiating team which is heavily made up of exactly those sort of people. So, Medinski, who is Russia’s chief negotiator and has been Russia’s chief negotiator since February 2022, is in charge. He is known to be by instinct and temperament a very tough hardliner. The Russians always wheel him out when they need someone to come out and set out a hard line. There’s been many attempts by all sorts of people both in the west and indeed in on the Russian side to say that Medinsky is a lightweight. I think on the Russian side claims that Middki is a lightweight have gradually uh uh disappeared. It’s true that he has an academic background as a historian which is actually very helpful in understanding the conflict in Ukraine. But something which uh was pointed out to me by a viewer um of our channel we have as we often say the best community and which I didn’t know which is that Medinsk’s background is of a type that suggests that he has had diplomatic training. So he’s not inexperienced and unqualified in this area and he is one of Putin’s top aids and he’s in overall charge of education policy which of course in Russia is sensitive and important. So Medinski is there but it’s the other people who are more interesting in some respects. Firstly the military is going to be very strongly represented. So we have Igor Korsukov who is the head of Russian military intelligence the organization that in the west they call the GRU. He is a military man. He obviously is extremely wellinformed about what is going on in Ukraine. He’s actually led some of the earlier negotiations with the Ukrainians in the past but only briefly. But he’s back and he’s obviously a heavy weight. And the other uh um official who’s going to be present is another very very senior military officer. He is the deputy chief of the operations department of the Russian general staff, the planning agency of the Russian general staff, the people who are in effect directing the war and who worked out all of the military plans and who have overall supervision of the entire military system in Russia. So, two very very senior military people and it looks like the foreign ministry is going to be represented also by two of its most senior deputy foreign ministers. One is Galuzin [clears throat] who is an expert on Ukraine but the other is Ryabkov. Now, um there’s some question mark about whether he’s actually going to um Abu Dhabi, but he was there at that Security Council meeting with the rest of the negotiating team. So, the answer is he probably is. But even if he is not, the fact is he’s clearly involved in the discussions in planning Russia’s negotiating strategy. Now, Ryabkov like Galuzin has a reputation as a hardliner. Ryabkov is perhaps the most senior of Russia’s deputy foreign ministers. Some believe that he is ultimately in line to replace uh uh um Lavrov when Lavough retires. But let’s put that aside. The other key thing to understand about LeB is that he is the expert on Russian relations connected with the security architecture of Europe. He was the person who led the Russian teams that negotiated with the Americans in December 2021 and January 2022 over the two draft treaties that Putin and the Russians presented to the Americans just ahead of the start of the special military operation. And he was the person who argued that the Americans had broken their promise by expanding NATO eastwards, that they deployed forces in Eastern Europe, again in breach of other promises that were made after NATO was expanded. And it was he who put the case that all NATO’s structures east of Germany needed to be dismantled and returned back to the pre-1998 position. So that’s Ryabkov, he knows all of that to his fingertips. He’s also a hardliner on Ukraine related matters. He’s talked about this many times. He’s talked about the importance of the Americans understanding the Russian constitution. In other words, the um Donetsk, Lugansk, Crimea, Kherson, and Zaphorosia are all part of the Russian Federation now. He’s pointed all of that out, and he’s always been the person the Russians wheel out whenever it looks as if the negotiations are somehow going going wrong in order to remind everybody of what the Russian position is. So he’s involved at the very least in drawing up the negotiating strategy and it is highly likely that he’s going to be there in Abu Dhabi as well. This is a very powerful negotiating team and critically from what we know of the opinions of at least three of these people the three civilians Medinsky Galuzin and Ryabkov they are all hardliners. Now the military people are not likely to be softliners. I mean it’s it’s illogical to expect that. So the Russians are sending a very powerful negotiating team to Abu Dhabi and Ryabkov’s presence or involvement shows that for the Russians the main topic of discussion is going to be the security architecture of Europe. That’s what they said they wanted to discuss back in December 2021, February 2022. They said that if the Americans didn’t uh exceed to their concerns at that time, they would take military technical steps. Part of those military technical steps were undoubtedly the special military operation. The Russians feel that they’re in a much stronger position now than they were were when those previous negotiations took place. And now we see a negotiating team that has been formatted not just to talk about Ukraine or even to talk mostly about Ukraine. It is a team that is clearly been formatted in order to address that wider European issue, the security architecture of Europe. Now the American team, we don’t even know who’s involved. probably Wick Golf and Kushner who are going to be completely outmatched. And on the Ukrainian side, we have Umerov and Budanov who are of course hardly in the same league to put it mildly. The Europeans are horrified by this. We’ve had an article in the Financial Times saying that they simply do not want to see this these sort of topics discussed. They are again trying to gate crash the talks. The Russians have repeatedly said over the last few days that the Europeans have not made a single proposal about the security architecture of Europe to the Russians over the last couple of days or weeks or indeed ever and that they don’t belong to the talks. If the Europeans try to gate crash the talks, it’s a good chance that the Russians will tell the Americans and the Ukrainians, well, in that case, we’re walking out. (12:56)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.