At the first US-Ukraine-Russia negotiations since February, talk turned to broad questions of security while wide gaps remain over core issues such as territorial control in the Donbas. Amid the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabl, Russia continued to attack Ukraine and crack down on is citizens at home.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
Police Action
When there's mayhem on the streets of Paris or some other European capital, Russian state TV plays it up as part of an ongoing effort by President Vladimir Putin's government to portray the West as unstable, divided, and in decline.
This week, though, chaotic scenes played out close to the Kremlin as police swept in and rounded up hundreds of young people on the streets and in a park in the heart of Moscow on Saturday night, November 7, which was, coincidentally, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Detainees, some of them minors, reported being beaten or forcibly detained, held for hours in packed police buses and precinct houses, denied water, and barred from going to the bathroom.
Some -- including a number of boys under the conscription age of 18 -- were handed draft notices, offered contracts, or pressured to join the military, which is seeking to maintain manpower for the war against Ukraine amid massive battlefield losses as Russia's full-scale invasion approaches the five-year mark.
Police, who activists say are not authorized to carry out conscription, asserted that the goal of the operation was to prevent alcohol consumption.
Whatever the official purpose or pretext, however, it came across in two ways. One: as an episode in a yearslong clampdown on dissent and curtailing of freedoms that has intensified during the war. The other: as an element of the state's effort to keep troop numbers steady without repeating a massive mobilization decreed by Putin in September 2022 that sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country.
In both cases, it was not the only such development this week.
On November 9, the Russian parliament advanced a bill that would establish fines for discrediting "traditional spiritual and moral values."
A co-author of the bill said it would hold Internet platforms, not individuals, responsible for violations. But Russian law includes no official definition of these values, and in its existing form the legislation would allow the authorities "to prosecute anyone they want for anything they want," legal expert Ilya Shablinsky told Current Time.
The push to impose punishments for violations of the "traditional values" that Putin and his government claim to espouse comes as Russia carries out daily attacks that kill, wound, and cause deprivation to Ukrainian civilians.
These attacks, and Ukrainian retaliation, did not stop over two days of US-led peace talks in Abu Dhabi on November 10-11, the first direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia since February.
They didn't stop because Russia has repeatedly rejected proposals for a cease-fire that would allow for peace talks to progress while halting the killing and holding the front lines in place. Instead, Putin says the guns need not go silent until a comprehensive peace agreement is reached.
'More Than Ukraine'
If Moscow gets its way, that pact will include, or be preceded by, an overarching agreement that would reshape European security architecture.
"The idea of defining clear parameters for a future security architecture, and only then moving on to resolving the actual Russia-Ukraine conflict, is absolutely reasonable," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow on November 10.
For the moment, though, Russia does not want Europe involved -- go figure -- and has so far rejected US efforts to bring Europe into the trilateral talks format.
The United States appears to be fully on board with the idea of a broader security agreement. Trump had earlier called for a cease-fire with front lines in place. Last week, however, he suggested the war would end soon with a "big, beautiful agreement" that is "going to involve more than Ukraine."
Kushner followed up by writing of "the need for a broader European security architecture that can help establish conditions for lasting peace," and both Moscow and Washington indicated that topic was at the heart of the trilateral talks.
Some analysts say a wider arrangement on security could be a crucial complement to any Russia-Ukraine peace deal that could be expected to last.
"I'm not sure there is a way to end the war other than by linking it to a broader arrangement on European security," Pavel Podvig, an expert on nuclear forces and disarmament, wrote on X.
At the same time, negotiations have been a way for the Kremlin to keep hopes alive for an end to the war while making no concessions and pushing ahead with a bid to achieve its goals by force. And analysts stress that Ukraine's immediate security is a far more urgent matter.
It's "hard to imagine a durable end to the war that does not address broader regional issues," Samuel Charap, senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, a US-based think tank, wrote on X ahead of the Abu Dhabi talks. But a "new European security order will not be agreed before the end of the war, and the war is not going to end this week."
"Starting that conversation could open the door to a cessation in Ukraine. And it is important in itself. But that is a months-long intensive process at best. Ukraine needs relief now, and that has to be the priority," Charap wrote, adding that "making the problem bigger can in principle be an effective tactic. But it can also be used to deliberately draw out a process and divide allies."
Russia's chief negotiator, Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, seemed determined to do just that in Abu Dhabi, railing against Europe and suggesting it has nothing to contribute to peace efforts at this point. Russia rejected US efforts to include European representatives in the talks, an idea Kushner indicated he would take to Putin, whom he said Witkoff were set to meet in Russia on November 12 before huddling with Zelenskyy in Dublin.
'Profoundly Unrealistic'
Medinsky also said the talks focused heavily on potential new security arrangements, which he indicated could extend not just beyond Ukraine but beyond Europe.
"The world needs a new, modern, updated security system -- one that is fair and does not disadvantage any particular countries," Medinsky said in remarks broadcast on Russian state television.
Coming from Moscow, calls like that are far from new. They go back at least as far as Putin's ascent to power over a quarter-century ago, with Russia seeking a reversal of its Cold War geopolitical losses and a restoration of its clout on the European continent.
In fact, that may have been one of the chief motives behind Putin's decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Moscow accuses the West of using Ukraine as a lever to weaken Russia, European governments contend that the Kremlin, with a mix of violence and diplomacy, is using its war on Ukraine in a bid to gain power and influence across Europe and around the world.
In December 2021, as it amassed troops along Ukraine's border, Russia sent a list of demands to the United States and NATO that would have rolled back some of the results of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, including blocking alliance military deployments beyond the alliance's 1997 borders. Washington rejected some of them and offered to negotiate on others -- and Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine weeks later.
Nearly five years on, with Russia launching relentless attacks on Ukraine and testing the West with drone incursions, cyberattacks, and other actions, "the idea [that] this is the moment to rethink European security is profoundly unrealistic," wrote Ruth Deyermond, senior lecturer in the department of war studies at King's College London.
"You cannot develop a new European security architecture when the Russian government wants and expects to defeat Ukraine, and also wants and expects to undermine both NATO and the domestic security of NATO members, and this is extremely unlikely to change," she wrote on X on November 10.