One theory of negotiation says the things you do away from the table matter more than anything you say at it. What you say is cheap. What you can keep doing to the other side until they sign is your actual price. This week Russia, Ukraine and the United States held their first US-brokered talks since February, in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday. As Al Jazeera reported, they produced no breakthrough apart from an agreement to swap a large number of prisoners, which Russia’s state-run TASS news agency said should happen in two to three weeks. Meanwhile, away from the table, both sides were busy.
Take Ukraine first. On Wednesday, while the delegations were meeting, Finland’s military said it had picked up something in the narrow strip of water between Finland and Estonia. “The Finnish Defence Forces detected… a strike on a Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland area and has monitored the development of the situation,” a spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement. Finland was not under any immediate military threat, the spokesperson said, and declined to say where or when the incident happened or how it was detected. Ukraine’s Security Service said it had hit the Buyan-M-class small missile ship Naro-Fominsk as part of a special operation, according to Finnish broadcaster Yle. Janes reported that a Finnish Defence Forces spokesperson put the strike on 11 November. Estonian media said the vessel was a small navy ship that later went back to St Petersburg. Russia has not commented, and it is not clear whether anyone was killed or hurt.
That same day Ukrainian drones went after the Leningrad region. Regional Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said drones started a fire in the port area of Ust-Luga, injuring three workers, and that 150 drones were shot down during the attack, which also cut off a power station. Ukraine’s General Staff said five fuel tanks were damaged: “According to preliminary information, as a result of drone strikes on the port’s oil infrastructure, the tank network suffered the most damage,” it said on Telegram. Some drones strayed into Baltic airspace. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania told their citizens to take shelter, and NATO scrambled warplanes.
The geography is the point. The Gulf of Finland is a narrow arm of the Baltic between two NATO members, and it runs east to St Petersburg. Ust-Luga, on its southern shore, is a key outlet for Russian oil and grain exports. Ilya Timtchenko, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told Al Jazeera the strike was thought to be the first by Ukrainian forces on a Russian ship in a part of the Baltic used by civilian traffic.
Finland’s defence minister, Antti Hakkanen, said Helsinki had raised it with Kyiv. “We have told the Ukrainians this time, and a little earlier too, how sensitive this narrow stretch of the Gulf of Finland, right between us and Estonia, is in terms of environmental safety and the safety of civilian shipping,” he said, according to Yle. He also said the spillover comes from Ukraine’s defensive fight, and that the sea around Finland was still safe: “You can still cruise with peace of mind.” That is a reassuring thing to hear from a defence minister. It is also an odd thing for one to have to say.
Why do this during talks? Timtchenko’s answer is the textbook one: “Kyiv continues to demonstrate two points simultaneously: That it is willing to negotiate and that it has a position of strength.” And: “Long-range strikes considerably strengthen Ukraine’s hand at the negotiating table, which is why Russian officials keep bringing them up.” Hitting refineries and ports puts a running cost on Russia’s war, and the cost stops only when there is a deal. That is leverage.
The awkward part is that the leverage also costs the mediator something. President Trump has blamed Ukraine’s strikes on Russian energy infrastructure for rising diesel prices, and last month he waived sanctions on Russia that Congress had overwhelmingly approved. So Ukraine’s best pressure on the other side is also an irritant to the person running the talks, which you might call a structuring problem.
The anchor
Now Russia. On Friday the German newspaper Bild reported that Russian negotiators in Abu Dhabi had proposed that Finland, which joined NATO in 2023, leave the alliance, and that NATO be barred from having military bases in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The informal proposals, shared with European representatives, also reportedly called for arrangements guaranteeing freedom of navigation in the Black Sea and the Baltic. Other accounts of the Bild report say the draft would let Moscow keep the territory it occupies and take all of Donbas, would demilitarise Odesa and Mykolaiv, and would require Ukrainian neutrality, in exchange for Russia removing its nuclear weapons from Belarus. Bild reportedly said this was only one of several unofficial drafts and that it was unclear whether Putin had endorsed it.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Moscow had demanded Finland’s withdrawal, Helsinki Times reported, and Hakkanen told Yle: “Such things are not subject to negotiation at all. Russia knows that.”
He is surely right, and that is sort of the idea. Here is a hypothetical. Imagine you are selling your house, and your counteroffer asks the buyer’s neighbour to move out. You don’t expect the neighbour to go. You want everyone arguing about the neighbour rather than your price. Opening with a demand that a country outside the talks give up its treaty membership moves the starting point, which leaves the demand for all of Donbas looking like the reasonable middle.
Territory is still the main sticking point. Ukraine wants Russia pushed back to the original border, and Putin wants all of the Donbas region. On the ground, Al Jazeera’s John T Psaropoulos writes, the front has kept going badly for Moscow, with casualties at a possible record and no significant territorial gains. Ukraine’s military said it caused more than 26,000 Russian casualties, meaning killed and seriously wounded, in the first 10 days of November. That is about 2,600 a day. Kept up for a 30-day month it would come to roughly 78,000, well above October’s figure of 54,400, which Ukraine says was the record. These are Ukrainian claims about an enemy’s losses, and each of those numbers is a person.
Moscow, then Dublin
On Thursday US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Putin in Moscow, where both sides agreed to keep talking. Then they flew to Ireland and met Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who praised their mediation. He was in Dublin for the European Political Community, a twice-yearly gathering set up in 2022 after the full-scale invasion. Al Jazeera reported that leaders from more than 40 European countries attended, and that the summit was dominated by the growing number of hybrid attacks on the continent and by talk of an envoy for Ukraine peace talks. That fits Europe’s recent effort to win a seat at the talks and then decide who fills it. If the Bild report is right, Europe’s representatives were in the building in time to be handed a draft about Finland.
So the one firm result of Abu Dhabi is a prisoner exchange, due in two to three weeks. The rest of the bargaining is still going on, much of it by drone.