It’s been more than four and a half years of war, and so the news is, at this point, less often about offensives and more often about rooms: who will sit in one, where the room will be, and who set it up. On Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine is ready to sit in one of those rooms quite soon — within the month, in fact — for trilateral talks with the United States and Russia.
Zelenskyy made the comments during a news conference in Kyiv, alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who was in town for the occasion. The venue for the proposed talks, Zelenskyy said, would be the United Arab Emirates or another location proposed by the United States. Kyiv, he said, supports a swift timeline for getting back to the table to try to end the war.
Notice the structure. This isn’t Ukraine and Russia sitting down to hash things out directly; it’s a three-sided format, with Washington in the chair in the middle, and the host country is one the Americans pick. The venue wars in diplomacy are their own little discipline: everyone agrees that meeting is good, and then everyone spends months arguing about whose flag is in the background of the photograph. Proposing the UAE — or, pointedly, “another US-proposed venue” — is a way of saying Ukraine isn’t going to litigate the furniture. Whatever room you’d like. We’ll be there.
Whether Russia shows up to that room is, of course, the entire question, and it is not answered in Sunday’s announcement. Saying you are ready for talks is cheap and costs nothing; it is also, not coincidentally, the correct move if you want Washington to keep finding rooms for you. The side that refuses the meeting tends to look like the side that doesn’t want peace, and neither capital enjoys that look. For now, what exists is a willingness, a month, and a shortlist of possible buildings. The war, at four and a half years and counting, has run on less.