The United States and Russia have agreed to restore high-level military-to-military communication, reopening a channel that had been suspended for more than four years as the war in Ukraine reshaped relations between the two powers.

The agreement emerged from meetings in Abu Dhabi involving senior Russian and American military officials, with U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Europe, present in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. European Command said the restored channel will provide a consistent line of contact while the sides continue to work toward a lasting peace.

The move is a practical step, but also a political signal. The AP report said the hotline had been shut down in late 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when tensions between Moscow and Washington were already rising. Since then, direct military contact has been one of the most sensitive areas in a broader rupture between the two countries.

The talks in Abu Dhabi took place while American, Russian and Ukrainian officials were also discussing the war’s endgame. U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, joined the delegations, according to Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s national security and defense council chief. Officials did not publicly describe any breakthrough in the negotiations.

The diplomatic backdrop remains volatile. Moscow has continued attacking Ukraine’s power grid, while fighting has carried on along a front line stretching across the east and south of the country. The AP report also pointed to several dangerous run-ins between Russian and NATO forces in recent years, including a 2023 Black Sea incident involving a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone and Russian fighter jets, as well as airspace incursions over Poland and Estonia in September.

The military hotline is meant to reduce the risk that those kinds of encounters escalate by accident. That matters as much as any political language attached to the talks. When the two sides are still operating in close proximity in the Black Sea and across Europe, a steady contact channel can be the difference between a contained incident and a broader crisis.

The agreement came alongside a prisoner exchange. Russia said it received 157 servicemen and three Russian nationals captured during Ukraine’s Kursk incursion, while Ukrainian officials said 150 servicemen and seven civilians returned. The release did not resolve the bigger conflict, but it showed that the talks in Abu Dhabi were producing at least some tangible outcomes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued that any settlement must include security guarantees from the United States and Europe. The AP report said he has warned that Ukrainians need to see real movement toward peace rather than a deal that would allow Russia to keep striking and gain the advantage. Against that backdrop, the restored military line is best understood as a narrow confidence-building measure inside a much broader and still unsettled diplomatic process.

The substantive question now is whether the reopened channel becomes a durable safeguard or just another temporary signal of thawing relations.