Abu Dhabi (AFP) - A first day of talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States aimed at brokering an end to the war in Ukraine concluded Wednesday in Abu Dhabi, with Kyiv describing negotiations as “substantive and productive”.

While there was no apparent breakthrough in the most recent round of discussions, meetings were set to carry on into a second day, Kyiv said.

The US-mediated talks are the latest in a flurry of diplomacy that has so far failed to strike a deal to halt the war, unleashed by Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

Underscoring the human toll from the conflict, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that 55,000 of his country’s troops had been killed, a rare assessment of battlefield losses that both Moscow and Kyiv have not typically provided.

“And there are a great number Ukraine lists as missing,” he told French TV network France 2, which translated his comments.

The war has spiralled into Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, with hundreds of thousands killed, millions forced to flee their homes in Ukraine and much of the eastern and southern part of the country decimated.

Wednesday’s talks came following weeks of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure, which have left Kyiv residents in darkness and cold, with temperatures dropping as low as -20C.

Despite the Kremlin repeating its hardline demands ahead of the talks, Ukraine’s top negotiator Rustem Umerov said the first day had been “substantive and productive, focused on concrete steps and practical solutions”.

Zelensky said on Wednesday he expected a new prisoner exchange with Russia “in the near future”.

- Land -

In Ukraine, foreign ministry spokesman Georgiy Tykhy said Kyiv was “interested in finding out what the Russians and Americans really want.”

The content of the talks was on “military and military-political issues,” he added, without elaborating.

The main sticking point in settling the conflict is the long-term fate of territory in eastern Ukraine.

Moscow is demanding that Kyiv pull its troops out of swathes of the Donbas, including heavily fortified cities atop vast natural resources, as a precondition of any deal.

It also wants international recognition that land seized in the invasion belongs to Russia.

Kyiv has said the conflict should be frozen along the current front line and has rejected a unilateral pull-back of forces.

Trump dispatched his ubiquitous envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to try to corral the sides to an agreement.

Russia’s top negotiator is military intelligence director Igor Kostyukov, a career naval officer sanctioned in the West over his role in the Ukraine invasion.

Europe fears it has been sidelined in the process, even as France and Britain lead efforts to put together a peacekeeping force that could be deployed to Ukraine after any deal.

It was “strategically important for Europe to at some point be part of the negotiations,” the EU’s ambassador to Ukraine Katarina Mathernova told AFP on Wednesday in Kyiv.

Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine, but Kyiv still controls around one-fifth of the Donetsk region.

Ukraine has warned that ceding ground will embolden Moscow and that it will not sign a deal that fails to deter Russia from invading again.

Russia also claims the Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as its own, and holds pockets of territory in at least three other Ukrainian regions in the east.

- ‘Prepare for the worst’ -

On the battlefield, Russia has been notching up gains at immense human cost, hoping it can outlast and outgun Kyiv’s stretched army.

Russian shelling of a market square in the frontline town of Druzhkivka killed seven on Wednesday, Ukrainian regional authorities said.

The CEO of Ukraine’s state-owned railway operator meanwhile told AFP that he believed recent Russian strikes were aimed at cutting off entire regions from the rest of the country.

Following the first round of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi last month, Ukrainians were sceptical that a deal could be struck with Moscow.

“I think it’s all just a show for the public,” Petro, a Kyiv resident, told AFP.

“We must prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

On the streets of Moscow, some were more hopeful.

“Everyone hopes, everyone is very optimistic about these negotiations,” says Larisa, a retiree who said she had family in Ukraine and relatives fighting at the front.

“It has to end one day, everyone’s had enough,” said Anton, a 43-year-old engineer.