No, dear colleagues, Donald Trump did not say this today, although he is certainly capable of such brutal frankness. Nonetheless, the reality of Russian victory is expressed at the tripartite talks ongoing in Abu Dhabi by the structure of the talks as Russian state television this evening explained to its audience: the territorial issue has been moved to stage two, while the present stage one is all about ensuring the security of BOTH sides in the conflict after conclusion of a peace treaty by revising the security architecture of Europe. And this is being done while the Europeans, who arrived in the capital of the United Arab Emirates uninvited, are excluded from the talks at Russian insistence and are sitting in their hotel rooms cursing the whole American led process.
This is a sea change in American foreign policy which neither Mainstream nor Alt Media seem capable of grasping.
Why, indeed, should the warmongers from Brussels, Paris, Berlin and London be sitting at the table and spoiling the proceedings by their vehement objections to any overall reconciliation with Russia? After all, NATO is the United States, with all other member states just hangers-on. And if a revision of the security architecture implies changes to or the irrelevancy of NATO, so be it.
*****
Russian reporting on the talks in Abu Dhabi said nothing about the content of the 5 hours that the sides spent together because all the principals to the talks were mum. But they did tell us who was sitting at the table for all three sides, and that by itself was quite revealing.
Vladimir Medinsky remains the head of the Russian delegation and chief negotiator. Historian of Russia with many books for the patriotic education of Russian youth to his credit, a native “Ukrainian” by birthplace, and now an experienced team leader, Medinsky’s opening remarks pointed to the enlarged Russian delegation which now has several high military officers with knowledge bearing on various dimensions of the talks. Most importantly, at his side was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Ryabkov. This is the same Ryabkov who was the lead speaker yesterday at the on line Round Table in Vienna yesterday dedicated to the question of the “militarization of Europe: what comes next?”, the speaker who said flatly that if war with Europe should break out “it will be brief,” meaning nuclear. More to the point, this is the same Ryabkov who in December 2021 presented to Washington and to NATO the Russian ultimatum calling for NATO forces to move back to where they were stationed in 1994, before the NATO expansion to the East that should never have taken place. And it was he who said: “if you do not move back, we will move you back!”
As we learned from Yevgeny Popov, Russia’s senior journalist in Abu Dhabi speaking on the 8 o’clock Vesti news, the Ukrainian delegation is headed by Rustem Umerov. His biography in Wikipedia has a couple of paragraph worth citing here to better understand what opportunities his heading the delegation may represent:
Quote
Rustem Enverovych Umerov (Ukrainian: Рустем Енверович Умєров; Crimean Tatar: Rüstem Enver oğlu Ümerov; born 19 April 1982) is a Ukrainian politician, businessman, investor, philanthropist and has served as the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine since 3 August 2026. Previously, he served as the Minister of Defence of Ukraine from 2023 to 2025 and as the Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council from 18 July 2025 to 3 August 2026. He is also a member of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.
While attending high school, Umerov participated in the Future Leaders Exchange program funded by the U.S. Department of State. As an exchange student, he lived in a host family and attended an American school for one academic year. Umerov received a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in finance from the National Academy of Management.
In 2013, with his brother Aslan Ömer Qırımlı [uk], Umerov founded the investment company ASTEM and its ASTEM Foundation. ASTEM manages investments in the fields of telecommunication, information technology, and infrastructure, mainly communication towers and fiber-optic networks.
The foundation funded Stanford University‘s Ukrainian Emerging Leaders program.”
I think the point is obvious: Umerov is a very sophisticated fellow. He is not your average thug in the Zelensky entourage. His warm feelings for the USA may make him more open to the complex solutions to the conflict with Russia that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have come to discuss.
I close this brief introduction to the talks by noting, per the Russian state television report, that the working language of the talks appears to be Russian.
All of the foregoing is not to suggest that the path ahead will be smooth or that it will end in success. But there definitely is promise in the fact that conceptually it is way above anything that the USA has contemplated since the fall of the USSR.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026
