First day of Ukraine peace talks constructive, Zelensky says

The first of two days of trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the US aimed at ending the war in Ukraine has concluded in Abu Dhabi.

While senior officials from Kyiv and Moscow were tight-lipped after the four hour-long discussions, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was not at the talks, said they had proved "constructive and quite substantive".

Speaking from Paris, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the meeting had been "very productive".

Although expectations for a breakthrough that ends Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine are low, US officials said earlier that Moscow and Kyiv were privately showing "a little bit of flexibility" on the issue of who would control Ukraine's eastern regions in a postwar scenario.