- President Donald Trump said Washington saw growing willingness to end Russia's war in Ukraine at a White House press briefing Monday.
- U.S., Russian and Ukrainian officials are set to meet for two days of negotiations in Abu Dhabi later today.
- Hackers said leaked Rosstat records showed nearly 394,000 war-related deaths since 2022.
President Donald Trump said Washington sees growing willingness to end Russia's war in Ukraine, as Kyiv and Moscow prepare for U.S.-brokered peace talks in Abu Dhabi later Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said recent battlefield gains were strengthening Kyiv's negotiating position ahead of the talks.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said both sides were battle-weary, more than four and a half years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
"We're also seeing a very strong inclination to end Russia and Ukraine," Trump said, adding that, "We're involved in that because I want to see people stop getting killed again."
His comments followed a U.S. official’s assessment that Moscow and Kyiv were privately showing some flexibility over a possible exchange of territory, according to Reuters.
A senior Ukrainian official, however, rejected suggestions that Kyiv was considering territorial concessions, telling Reuters that any discussion of territory would have to take place between national leaders and be accompanied by appropriate security guarantees.
Russia has publicly maintained its demand that Ukraine surrender the entire eastern Donbas region, including territory Moscow has not captured.
Separately, Zelenskyy said Monday that recent Ukrainian battlefield gains and mounting Russian losses had improved Kyiv's bargaining power.
"Right now, Ukrainian troops are truly strengthening Ukraine's negotiating positions," he said in his nightly address, urging Washington to convince Russia to end the war.
The remarks come as U.S., Russian and Ukrainian officials prepare for two days of talks in Abu Dhabi — their first trilateral negotiations since February.
U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are set to lead Washington’s mediation efforts, with postwar security guarantees for Ukraine expected to feature prominently.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that discussions had advanced on a possible postwar security framework for Ukraine and Europe.
"Nothing's been finalized yet, and maybe some progress can be made in Abu Dhabi," Rubio said.
The renewed diplomacy comes amid continued fighting and mounting questions over the scale of Russia's wartime losses.
Belarusian Cyber Partisans, an opposition-linked hacker group, said its analysis of data it claims was obtained from Russia's state statistics agency identified 393,881 deaths linked to military operations or their consequences between 2022 and August 2026.
The group said its count was based on death records explicitly coded as resulting from hostilities or their consequences. It acknowledged that the figure could include civilians and deaths connected to other conflicts, while excluding personnel who are missing but have not been declared dead.
Rosstat has acknowledged that it was targeted in cyberattacks but denied that its databases were compromised, according to a Russian media outlet Kommersant. The hackers' claims and the underlying dataset have not been independently verified in full.
Separately, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that 400,000 to 450,000 Russian military personnel were killed between February 2022 and June 2026.
At the upper end, that would be more than nine times the combined Soviet and Russian military fatalities in wars since World War II, according to the think tank.
The Moscow Times, citing a broader analysis of the leaked records, reported that roughly 450,000 war-related deaths would make the conflict Russia's fourth most common cause of death since 2022. The newspaper said it had cross-checked a sample of names, but could not verify the data set in its entirety.
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