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Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.

I'm Tim Franks. The vast toll of Russia's war inside Ukraine we all know about, the huge numbers killed, the fear and displacement and cold, endless, biting cold caused to Ukrainians by the daily aerial bombardments.

And with Russia's advances in the East coming not just bloodily, but it feels at a grindingly slow pace. It may seem

sometimes that diplomacy is proceeding at a similarly painful tempo, negotiations brokered by the US,

which are often talked up by the American side, but which ultimately do not lead to a ceasefire,

let alone a peace. So the question today is whether that mould may be about to be broken, because we're

expecting later today the first trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the US since the

full-scale invasion of nearly four years ago.

They'll be held in Abu Dhabi.

Let's cross first to our Eastern Europe correspondent, Sarah Rainsford, in Kiev. Sarah, I'm wondering whether you, well,

what you make of the prospect of these talks, and also the fact that Steve Wittkoff,

the American envoy, has said that we've really just got down to one issue. What's he talking about?

Yeah, I mean, the problem is that that one issue is the central issue. I mean, if it's true that

there's only really one issue that stands between Ukraine and peace breaking out. That issue is the issue of territory,

and it's the most controversial, the most difficult to resolve. It's the one where Russia essentially

is insisting that Ukraine needs to withdraw from the rest of the Dombas region in the east of

this country and hand it over to Russia.

And Ukraine, of course, there's no way because that's territory that it's been defending at the cost of a huge number of soldiers' lives for many years.

And it's not simply going to gift that to Russia if Russia hasn't been able to win it through

fighting.

So that is the one little issue that remains between these two countries.

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