KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian and Russian officials began a new round of U.S.-brokered peace talks on Tuesday in Switzerland, though hopes of a breakthrough to end the war were low. Fighting rages on, past negotiations have produced little, and major hurdles to a deal are unresolved.

The talks, which began on Tuesday afternoon and will run through Wednesday, were the third trilateral meeting between Ukrainian, Russian and American negotiators in roughly three weeks.

Ukraine and Russia have described two previous rounds of discussions in the United Arab Emirates as productive. But those talks delivered scant progress beyond a prisoner-of-war exchange. The conflict will enter its fifth year later this month as Russia continues to strike Ukraine’s power grid, including in an attack on Tuesday involving nearly 40 missiles and 400 drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.

Kyiv and Moscow are still far apart on the core obstacles to a peace deal: the fate of Ukrainian-held territory in the east that Russia wants — an issue expected to dominate this week’s talks — and the question of postwar Western security guarantees to deter another Russian invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine underscored those differences in social media posts on Monday, warning that it would be “a big mistake to allow the aggressor to take something” — an apparent reference to Russia’s demand for the eastern territories. He also urged the United States to advance work on security guarantees, which has been complicated by Moscow’s insistence that such guarantees must exclude Western troop deployments in Ukraine.

Rustem Umerov, the head of the Ukrainian delegation and the secretary of the country’s National Security Council, published pictures on social media that showed him seated at a table with other Ukrainian officials, including Kyrylo Budanov, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff.

To their right, according to the pictures, sat American mediators, including Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy; and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Both had just wrapped up talks focused on Iran that were also held in Geneva.

Facing the Ukrainians was the Russian delegation, which included Vladimir Medinsky, a top Kremlin aide, as well as military intelligence figures, according to the pictures.

The presence of Medinsky, a former culture minister and amateur historian who led negotiations for Moscow last year, has been seen by some in Ukraine as a discouraging signal. In previous talks, Medinsky grated on his Ukrainian counterparts with lengthy historical lectures and a hard-line stance, warning that Russia was prepared to keep fighting indefinitely.

Medinsky was absent from the two trilateral meetings this year in the United Arab Emirates, where Russia was represented by security and military intelligence officials — a shift that Ukrainian officials said helped improve the tone of the talks.

“These are different people, and there were no more pseudohistorical lectures,” Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, told Ukrainian media last month after the first trilateral meeting. “The conversations were very focused.”

Those meetings focused on the mechanics of a ceasefire and how it would be monitored by the United States, Zelenskyy told Bloomberg last week. They did not appear to address the bigger sticking points related to territorial issues and security guarantees — which analysts said may explain why the talks were described as constructive.

Zelenskyy told Bloomberg that this week’s negotiations would most likely center on the territorial issue. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, confirmed as much on Monday in a call with reporters, adding that the change in focus had prompted the return of Medinsky as “the chief negotiator.”

President Vladimir Putin of Russia has insisted that the war would not end unless Ukraine cedes the portion of the eastern Donetsk region it still controls — roughly 2,000 square miles of land, about the size of Delaware.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Russia’s territorial demand was a nonstarter. But he has signaled openness to compromise, suggesting a demilitarized zone in Donetsk where both Ukrainian and Russian troops would pull back from an equal portion of territory. Polls in Ukraine also show a growing acceptance of territorial concessions among a war-weary public.

Russia has long asserted that its slow but steady advance on the battlefield means Ukraine would be better off agreeing to a deal that includes territorial concessions now, rather than having Kyiv lose land later in bloody fighting.

Ukraine, by contrast, has sought to maximize the cost of Russia’s advance by inflicting as many casualties on its troops as possible. Counterattacks over the past week have allowed Ukrainian troops to regain some positions in the east along the Haichul River, which serves as a natural barrier to Russian advances, according to battlefield maps and military analysts.

The recent gains — which came after Russian troops lost access to the internet through Starlink satellites, crippling their communications — suggest that Kyiv can still seize the initiative on the battlefield and strengthen its negotiating hand. But Ukrainian officials said this month that the Trump administration was ramping up pressure on them to make concessions, in a push to end the war by early summer.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Constant Méheut/Tyler Hicks
c. 2026 The New York Times Company