US Envoy Kushner says, after the Abu Dhabi talks, that he and Witkoff will go to Russia to meet President Putin on Thursday. Progress made on Ukrainian security guarantees. Post-conflict security discussed. Territorial issues will be the most difficult

• Good, but tough, first meeting.
• EU and NATO talks were good.
• Europe should be involved.
• Currently no trust between the sides.
• Peace talks are complicated, all the needed points are there to come to a deal, trying to find a way to make it come together.
• After meeting Putin, they will meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky.

Shuttle diplomacy of this kind, US envoys moving between the warring parties' capitals with a leader-level meeting in Moscow, has historically been how ceasefire frameworks get built, but the sequencing matters: when the envoys go to the party seen as the harder side first and then to the other, that has tended to signal the outline of a deal exists and the gap is in the details rather than in willingness to talk. The explicit flag that territorial issues are the hardest is consistent with past episodes of this sort, where security guarantees were the tractable element and the land question was what prolonged or broke the talks. The stated intent to bring Europe in is a departure from bilateral formats that earlier negotiation rounds attempted, and prior instances where European capitals were sidelined produced frameworks that subsequently stalled on implementation. The established market pattern around credible Russia-Ukraine progress has been disinflationary for European gas and power benchmarks, supportive of the euro and regional risk, and mildly negative for gold, with the size of the move tracking whether the news concerns the process or an actual cessation of hostilities; process headlines of this kind have tended to fade unless a ceasefire follows. The next tells are the readout from the Putin meeting itself, whether Zelensky accepts the same terms, and any shift in rhetoric from European officials regarding their role in the guarantees. As with prior rounds, the distinction between a framework and a ceasefire is the distinction between a headline trade and a durable repricing.