Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a large-scale exchange of prisoners of war, officials said on Wednesday, the one concrete outcome of two days of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi — their first direct meeting in nine months.

“One of the positives is we agreed that we’re going to have the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, which we’re going to finalise the numbers tomorrow,” Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy, said after the talks ended. Vladimir Medinsky, who led the Russian delegation, and Rustem Umerov, who led Kyiv’s team, both confirmed the planned exchange.

No figure and no date were announced at the talks themselves, though Russian state news agency TASS later cited Lieutenant-General Alexander Zorin as saying the swap could take place in the next two to three weeks and involve more than 1,000 captives on each side.

No breakthrough on ending the war

The talks produced no ceasefire and no breakthrough on the central questions of territory, security guarantees and the future role of European states. Mr Medinsky said mutual understanding had been reached on some issues but not on others, and that more negotiations would follow. He also made clear that Moscow saw no role for the European Union in the process for now.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had described the first day of talks as “constructive and quite substantive”. The Abu Dhabi session was the first meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in nine months, and the first three-way round with the United States since talks in Geneva in February.

What happens next

Mr Kushner said he and fellow US envoy Steve Witkoff would travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet President Vladimir Putin, then fly to Dublin to meet Mr Zelenskyy, as Washington tries to keep the diplomatic momentum going.

The talks took place against the backdrop of continued fighting, with little territory changing hands on the front line this year. Prisoner exchanges have been one of the few areas where the two sides have kept cooperating through nearly five years of war, with swaps taking place from time to time even as the fighting has raged.

If the Abu Dhabi agreement holds, it would be the largest such release yet — a humanitarian step, but not yet a step towards peace.