US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have said European negotiators would join the next round of talks on ending the Ukraine war, though Moscow has yet to confirm it.
The pair met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin for about two hours yesterday before flying to Ireland to brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky was in Dublin for the ninth summit of the European Political Community.
The Moscow visit followed two days of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi on November 10-11, after which Kushner said the envoys would ask Putin to approve a format with direct European participation. European envoys in Abu Dhabi were kept away from the main table and briefed separately by the Ukrainian delegation.
Speaking before he left Moscow, Witkoff told Russian state television that “the Europeans will join at the next meeting”. He gave no date, venue or list of participants.
In a post on X, Kushner, who is also US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, said both sides had “agreed to expand the next round of negotiations to include our European partners”. He said this would allow the talks to cover post-war European security arrangements alongside territorial questions.
The envoys met Zelensky for more than an hour at Casement Aerodrome, a military base in Baldonnel, west of Dublin. Speaking alongside them, Zelensky said Europe would sit on the negotiating team rather than be kept in separate talks.
“This is important for us because the war is in Europe,” he said.
The Kremlin has not said whether it accepts a wider format. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Europe would first have to name a representative, comparing the Europeans to spiders squabbling in a jar.
Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said today that Europe’s position had already been set out in full. In comments released by the Russian foreign ministry, he accused European governments of trying by every means to get into the talks and said they had to choose between peace and continued war.
Putin also stood by Russia’s territorial demands and rejected any deployment of foreign peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, according to Euronews. The Kremlin said he reminded the envoys of Moscow’s 2021 demand that NATO roll back its military presence in central and eastern Europe.
Kushner had already urged Europe to sort out its own representation, saying that naming one person to speak for it would be a bigger achievement than winning Russia’s consent. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote to European Council President António Costa on November 5 demanding that the bloc decide who speaks for it and with what mandate.
EU leaders were meeting informally in Dublin today, with the issue expected to hang over the gathering.
