The trilateral talks in Geneva

Friday 20 February 2026

Geneva has become, once again, the sort of neutral room in which the war’s loudest arguments are forced to speak in quieter voices. Over 17–18 February 2026, delegations from the United States, Ukraine and Russia met in Switzerland for the latest round of US-brokered trilateral talks — a process that has begun to generate something rare in this conflict: not an end, but a set of procedures that might one day make an end enforceable. 

The outcome, as Kyiv framed it, was a negotiation split cleanly into two tracks. On the military track — the practical business of how a ceasefire would actually be observed — Ukraine says there was meaningful convergence. On the political track — territory, security guarantees, the fate of strategic infrastructure, and the broader architecture of settlement — there was movement of a different sort: not agreement, but continued contact, and an implicit acknowledgement that only leaders may be able to make decisions that negotiators cannot. 

What appears to have been agreed

The most concrete development emerging from Geneva concerns ceasefire monitoring. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia and Ukraine were close to a document establishing how any ceasefire would be monitored, and he described the military track as an area where “pretty much everything” had been agreed — including, importantly, that the American side would be involved in monitoring. 

That matters because ceasefires fail for predictable reasons — not merely because of bad faith, but because the fog of war creates ambiguity, and ambiguity creates accusations, and accusations become pretexts. If the parties are edging towards an agreed mechanism, then they are tacitly admitting that the first battlefield is not the line of contact, but the definition of a violation. Monitoring is where politics is translated into enforceable facts — and it is also where trust is replaced by verification. 

The process also appears to have produced agreement on continuity. Zelenskyy said that on the political track there was dialogue and that the sides agreed to move forward and continue — and the White House, via spokesperson commentary reported by Ukrainian media, similarly indicated that another round would take place. Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky described the talks as “difficult but businesslike”, a formulation that usually signals a willingness to stay at the table even when positions remain unreconciled. 

Finally, the Geneva round reinforced a pattern that has become an outcome in its own right: the United States is not merely convening these talks, but shaping the agenda. A senior US envoy, Steve Witkoff, characterised the discussions as “meaningful progress” and said both parties would update their leaders and keep working. That framing — progress as process, rather than progress as concession — may be the only politically sustainable way for Washington to hold the line between Kyiv’s existential stakes and Moscow’s maximalist posture. 

What remains outstanding

The unresolved issues are, in truth, the war.

First, there is territory — the question of what Russia keeps, what Ukraine regains, and what is merely frozen. Reporting around the Geneva discussions indicates that occupied territories remain the biggest sticking point, with Kyiv maintaining that freezing current positions is the most realistic foundation for a ceasefire, while Moscow demands Ukrainian withdrawal from parts of the Donbas — including areas Russia does not fully control. Zelenskyy’s own public remarks underscore that political progress has been slower, and that land is the most divisive issue — one he suggested may require direct leader-level negotiation. 

Secondly, there is the question of security guarantees — the insurance policy without which any ceasefire becomes, from Ukraine’s perspective, a pause before renewed assault. RFE/RL reported that the Geneva talks focused on territorial claims and security guarantees as two of the thorniest obstacles, with Ukraine continuing to press for guarantees robust enough to deter future aggression. A monitoring mechanism may make a ceasefire measurable — but only guarantees make it strategically credible. 

Thirdly, there are the “sensitive issues” that sit at the intersection of sovereignty, energy security and international law. Euronews reported that the political track includes the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (occupied by Russia since 2022) and described a US-floated idea under which the plant would be jointly operated by Ukraine, the United States and Russia with shared economic benefits — an approach Kyiv views as potentially legitimising occupation. Even if such schemes are framed as technical fixes they are, in practice, constitutional questions wearing engineering clothing. 

Fourthly, there is the sequencing problem — who moves first, and what they get in return. The European intelligence community, speaking to Reuters, has voiced scepticism that Moscow is negotiating in order to settle, rather than to extract concessions — particularly around sanctions relief and economic opportunities — while keeping her strategic aims intact. Whether that assessment is fully fair or not, it points to a structural difficulty: the incentives to prolong talks can be stronger than the incentives to conclude them, especially for the side that believes time is an ally. 

Reading the Geneva outcome honestly

Seen through Kyiv’s lens, Geneva produced an important but limited result: a near-agreed procedure for ceasefire monitoring, with US involvement — and not much else that could yet be safely described as settlement. 

Seen through Moscow’s lens, the talks preserve a stage on which she can appear reasonable, test Western unity, and probe for political trades — while maintaining demands that would translate military occupation into diplomatic recognition. Even sympathetic observers of negotiation should not underestimate how central symbolism is to Russia’s war aims; land is not merely land, but a narrative of victory. 

Seen through Washington’s lens, Geneva looks like the construction of a ladder — not yet a bridge. A monitoring framework is a rung; continued meetings are another. But the gap between rungs and the far side remains wide, because the political questions are not technical — they are existential, and therefore resistant to incrementalism. 

That is why the most revealing sentence to emerge from this round may be Zelenskyy’s implication that land will require leaders. It is a recognition that negotiators can draft mechanisms and narrow language — but they cannot sign away sovereignty, nor can they credibly promise a future security order, without the authority of heads of state and the domestic legitimacy that authority requires. 

In practical terms, Geneva’s trilateral talks have not produced a peace — and they were never likely to. They have produced something both more modest and more necessary: the outline of how a ceasefire might be supervised in a war where both sides assume cheating, and where a single disputed incident could collapse diplomacy overnight. If that outline becomes a document, and that document becomes practice, it will not end the war by itself — but it may, at last, give diplomacy a way to hold the line long enough for politics to decide what the battlefield has not.