Kremlin says next round of peace talks on Ukraine is set for next week

Russia said on Friday that a new round of talks with US and Ukrainian officials seeking to broker an end to the four-year war would take place next week.

Two previous rounds of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi have failed to lead to a breakthrough, with Moscow and Kyiv remaining far apart on the key issue of territory.

“There is an agreement that it will indeed take place next week. We will inform you about the venue and dates,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, including AFP, when asked about whether a new meeting had been planned.

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US President Donald Trump is pushing to end the conflict, unleashed when Russia launched its full-scale military offensive in February 2022.

Moscow has stuck to its demands for sweeping territorial and political concessions from Ukraine -- rejected by Kyiv as tantamount to capitulation.

Russia is pushing for Ukraine to pull out of the eastern Donetsk region -- around one-fifth of which Kyiv’s forces still control.

Ukraine has rejected a unilateral pull-back and wants robust Western security guarantees to deter Russia from re-launching its offensive following any ceasefire.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this week that he had accepted a US proposal to hold a round of talks in Miami next week.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the four-year conflict, Europe’s deadliest since World War II.

Russia occupies around one-fifth of Ukrainian land -- including the Crimean peninsula it seized in 2014 and areas that Moscow-backed separatists had taken prior to 2022.

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