The 47th and 48th escort taskforces the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy held a mission handover ceremony in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday.
With the separation order issued, the guided-missile destroyer Baotou (Hull 133), and the guided-missile destroyer Tangshan (Hull 122) fired three green signal flares each, and all ships sounded horns, with officers and sailors waving goodbye.
Subsequently, the two taskforces turned 90 degrees to the left and right respectively.
After the ceremony, the 48th Chinese naval escort taskforce will take over from the 47th taskforce for the remaining escort missions.
The PLA Navy began conducting escort missions in the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia in December 2008.
Chinese navy escort fleets hold handover ceremony for mission rotation
Russian political experts said the upcoming talks between Russia, the United States and Ukraine amount to technical consultations, with almost no room for negotiation on core issues, making major breakthroughs unlikely.
The trilateral talks on the Ukraine issue will be held in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, from Tuesday to Wednesday. Security guarantees for the parties, confidence-building measures and humanitarian efforts are among the topics for discussion.
"These are consultations, not negotiations. Discussions are underway on important, but in principle, technical questions. That is, they will not talk about territories, they will not talk about the nature of the regime, they will not talk about Ukraine's internal rules regarding language and Russian culture," said Dmitry Trenin, chairman of the Russian International Affairs Council.
"In my view, the Ukrainian side is not independent. The shadow of the European Union is always looming there. And in current conditions, the Europeans, by and large, do not want to make concessions to Russia," said Andrey Sidorov, associate professor at the History Department of Moscow State University.
Russian President Vladimir Putin set out Moscow's position at a meeting with the Foreign Ministry leadership in June 2024, saying Russia would declare a ceasefire and begin talks as soon as Ukrainian forces withdraw from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and Kiev announces it will not join NATO.
"When our president articulated these demands, a corresponding caveat was made - that if you do not meet us halfway now, our positions may harden according to the real situation on the ground. And Ukraine and the West are letting the time slip away," said Andrey Koshkin, head of the Department of Political Analysis and Socio-Psychological Processes at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.
Ahead of the Abu Dhabi talks, a humanitarian operation was carried out in the city of Oleshky in the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, evacuating hundreds of civilians to safe locations.
According to Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, Russia prioritizes achieving its goals by peaceful means. On Friday, Putin also invited members of the Russian negotiation team to a meeting with Federal Security Council members to discuss the upcoming trilateral talks.
"It can be said with certainty that we will definitely not compromise on territories. But for everything else -- the size of the Ukrainian army, the security zone, security guarantees for Ukraine from the West, they can be discussed," said Konstantin Blokhin, a leading researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Russian experts expect little breakthrough from Russia-U.S.-Ukraine talks in Abu Dhabi
