Kremlin says 'ready' to resume 3-way talks with US and Ukraine mid-November

We're going to go to Russia now, a new round of trilateral talks involving Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine could take place, we are hearing, in Abu Dhabi in November. That is according to a Kremlin foreign policy aide talking on state television in Russia. Zelensky has already said he would only take part in any such talks if the front line is frozen. and today the Kremlin declared that Putin might participate if numerous conditions are met. Steve Witkoff, of course, in St. Petersburg, as all this is happening. And Donald Trump said it was time for Ukraine to end the war or, in his words, face a very bad thing. That is all the background. This from Gulliver Craig a little earlier in Kharkiv. Very few people in Ukraine expect anything to come out of that because they see the Russians continuing to be absolutely intransigent. Vladimir Putin was not impressed, apparently, with the allegedly new proposals that Steve Witkoff brought after his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo. I'm not sure if they really were new proposals because Ukraine's position also remains unchanged. It's very much willing to negotiate, willing to freeze the conflict on its current lines. They would like to have some kind of security guarantees. Vladimir Putin is not prepared to do that. The Ukrainians would like to have a ceasefire before a final settlement is reached. The Russians have said that that's not what they want. The Ukrainians feel very much that this is all going round in circles. I think that there are surely very, very big concerns within the armed forces about how they're going to manage going forward if they don't get the access to Starshield restored. But there's some hope that at least that might get done. At least Volodymyr Zelensky, after talking with Marco Rubio, seemed to be saying that they were working towards restoring full access to that Starshield system. But the Americans are still unwilling to admit who actually was behind the decision to limit it or whether there even was a decision or it just kind of organically happened. The main feeling that I get from Ukrainians is not sadness or a lack of morale. It's just anger at the Americans, anger and astonishment that they could dare to behave like this and so repeatedly show such ignorance or willful untruthfulness it's not sure um you know where those two things are shared out between them but they just keep saying things that don't correspond to reality and what's perhaps even more worrying is that it's clearly not only Donald Trump you've got also Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Steve Witkoff of course the Ukrainians had already understood he's regarded in Ukraine as a complete idiot um but i think the fact that people like Marco Rubio seem to be saying such incoherent things is a source of deep concern. The list is too long now of blows for Ukraine recently. Where are we actually on the battleground now? How is this all impacting what is happening to soldiers and what equipment they have on the battleground? Well, I think it might be a bit too early for us to start seeing a major impact of the limitations on the speed of Starshield equipment for the Ukrainian soldiers. But if you think about what happened when Elon Musk agreed to limit the Russians' access to similar technology, I think they had a slightly different deal. But at the beginning of this year, that's when things started to get better for the Ukrainians on the front lines. And the Russians started being on the back foot, rather, as they have been up till now. Recently, Ukraine managed to claim 277 square kilometres. Not that much, but not nothing either in the northern part of Donetsk region from under Russian occupation. And there's a fear that the Ukrainians could find themselves facing the same sort of problems that the Russians did earlier this year when suddenly losing access to these systems. But we don't see that much evidence of it yet. And among the general population, I don't feel any sense of panic. One person I just spoke to here in Kharkiv, who's running a cultural centre here, he said, we've had so many times already so far in this war when there seemed to be a major blow, whether a new technology or the Americans suddenly letting us down or the Europeans refusing some aid that we thought we were going to get, that we've got used to not panicking in these kinds of situations. The blows keep coming, but we're still determined to keep fighting. That's the message I keep hearing from all kinds of different Ukrainians, actually. Gulliver Craig there talking from Kharkiv.