KYIV: Russia and Ukraine will hold US-brokered talks on February 17-18 in Geneva, both countries said Friday, announcing the next leg in fraught negotiations seeking to end the four-year war.
US President Donald Trump is pushing to end the conflict, unleashed when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but two previous rounds of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi have not yielded any signs of a breakthrough.
Both sides said publicly the discussions were productive, but Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on the key issue of territory.
"The next round of talks on the Ukrainian settlement will be held in the same trilateral Russia-US-Ukraine format, on February 17–18 in Geneva," Russia's state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.
An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later confirmed to journalists that its delegation was preparing for the negotiations next week.
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.
Peskov said Moscow's delegation to Geneva will be headed by Vladimir Medinsky, a hawkish ex-culture minister who led previous failed talks in Turkey, in a switch from the senior military officials who led two previous rounds in Abu Dhabi.
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 the 2022 invasion.
