US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have completed a two-capital diplomatic run inside 48 hours, meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on September 5 and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev yesterday.
The Kiev leg has been the first visit either man has made to the Ukrainian capital since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Trump had set expectations high before they left, calling the pair great negotiators at the White House on September 4. “They’re bringing with them a proposal to end the war,” he said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov played that down, pointing out that the US president had himself said there were no new ideas on the table.
The Moscow meeting ran for three hours and 10 minutes and was followed by dinner with Putin, according to Kyiv Post. It closed without an announced breakthrough.
Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov described the discussion as useful and said the Americans had prepared seriously for the trip. He said the two envoys had set out a series of considerations on possible routes to a settlement and had undertaken to carry Putin’s own assessments into their meetings in Kiev.
Ushakov also told TASS that Putin had told the envoys it was necessary to eliminate “all root causes of the Ukrainian conflict”, the formula Moscow has used since 2022 for demands that reach well beyond territory.
A White House official said both sides had discussed substantive plans for next steps, which were expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
What Putin conceded was narrow. He ordered a halt to strikes on Kiev for three days from midnight on September 5, matched by a reciprocal Ukrainian pause on strikes against Moscow. He rejected a wider ceasefire along the front line.
The limits of that arrangement showed within hours. Russian air strikes were recorded at 11 locations across Ukraine, CNN reported, and the Ukrainian military said the pause applied only to strikes at operational depth. Ten civilians were killed and 65 injured in the 24 hours to September 6.
Russian drone and missile activity also kept the American delegation off aircraft. Ukraine had airfields ready to receive them, but the envoys travelled overland by rail from the Polish city of Rzeszów, in the country’s southeast, arriving at Kiev’s central railway station aboard a train marked “Peace Express”.
They were met by Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Office of the President, and Rustem Umerov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Zelensky greeted the two men in the city centre and thanked them for a visit that had bought the capital a quiet weekend. “Today you worked even better than the Patriot systems,” he said.
Talks then ran in three rounds. Two were bilateral with the American delegation. The third brought in national security advisers representing the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
At a press briefing afterwards, Zelensky set out three priorities agreed with Washington.
The first is a winter package covering air defence, protection of the electricity grid and access to American liquefied natural gas, which he said Ukraine would depend on if the fighting continued through the cold months.
The second is the revival of a negotiating process that had stalled while Washington’s attention was absorbed by the war with Iran, NPR reported.
The third is what Zelensky called a prosperity plan, pairing security guarantees with economic guarantees for reconstruction. He said the Ukrainian army remained the country’s primary guarantee and that the resources to sustain it had to be assured.
Territory was raised but not settled. Zelensky said questions of that weight would have to be resolved by leaders directly.
Ukraine, the US and European governments have agreed to meet again, though no venue has been fixed. Zelensky said he was open to Europe, the US or Ukraine.
The European presence in Kiev was national rather than institutional. The three governments at the table were the British, French and German; neither the European Commission nor the European Council was represented.
That division of labour has become familiar. The EU has carried the financing while the three largest European military powers have carried the diplomacy.
The Commission transferred a further €3.47 billion to Ukraine on July 30 under the bloc’s €90 billion support loan, most of it reserved for defence industrial capacity. Ukraine becomes liable to repay the principal only if it receives war reparations from Russia.
Zelensky has separately pressed EU capitals to blacklist the component suppliers and intermediaries that keep Russian missile and drone production running.
The declared positions on substance have not visibly moved since December, when Zelensky dropped Ukraine’s bid to join NATO in exchange for what he said should be legally binding Western guarantees, and rejected a US suggestion that Ukrainian forces pull back from the part of Donetsk they still hold to create a demilitarised economic zone. Moscow continues to demand that withdrawal.
Kushner set out the American interest in transactional terms, telling reporters in Kiev that his father-in-law wanted the killing to stop and families reunited, after which the US president could turn to investment. “The president always says that the harder it is, the better,” he said.
The war entered its fifth year in February. The pause on strikes against the two capitals expires today.
