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Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have wrapped up back-to-back meetings with Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.
Recap of meetings: The first meeting kicked off in Moscow over the weekend and ran more than three hours behind closed doors, ending with no announced breakthrough. Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov called it constructive, extremely frank and conducted in a spirit of trust, and said the Americans came prepared with a number of ideas on possible routes to a settlement. He said the conversation also covered economic issues and potentially large joint US-Russia projects.
A White House official said the two sides mapped out next steps that will be made public in the coming weeks, and that the delegation thanked Putin for releasing US Marine veteran Robert Gilman last month, after he had been hospitalized in serious condition.
Witkoff and Kushner’s visit to Ukraine, their first since the peace effort began, came on Sunday, and it took a deal of its own to arrange. The US pushed for Ukraine to pause strikes on Moscow and Russia to pause strikes on Kyiv while the envoys were on the ground. Zelensky committed Friday evening, saying Ukraine would refrain from hitting Moscow through Monday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov then told TASS that Putin had ordered no strikes on Kyiv for three days starting at midnight. Ukraine’s airspace is closed, so the two flew from Moscow to Poland Saturday night and took a train in.
Zelensky met the envoys twice on his own, and a third session brought in national security advisers from the UK, France and Germany. He said most of it came down to weapons, Patriots included, and what Ukraine has to have on hand over the next few months. “If the war drags on until winter, and that is how things currently look, we will need a ‘winter package,'” Zelensky said, adding that Ukraine is asking Washington for a lot of it, with Europe behind the request. Of the European advisers in the room, he said: “Here we are all on the same side.”
Kushner was blunt about the odds. “It’s a very, very hard problem, but we’re going to try,” he said, describing US work happening out of public view to build conditions where a deal is possible. A source familiar with the talks said the envoys want to take another pass at the peace proposal with both sides, and that things could move as long as everyone keeps at it.
This all comes as Ukraine and Russia remain far apart on their demands for ending the war. Ukraine is seeking its territory back, reparations for the damage Russia has caused, and hard security guarantees from Washington and Europe.
Its 20-point plan calls for keeping an army of 800,000 in peacetime, a written Russian commitment to refrain from aggression against Ukraine and Europe, negotiations based on the current line of contact rather than a unilateral withdrawal from Donbas, and joint Ukrainian, American and Russian operation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia wants the entire Donbas region handed over, with Putin demanding the Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts on top of Crimea, roughly 22% of Ukraine’s territory. Moscow has said it will only discuss security guarantees if Kyiv gives up all of Donbas first.
