United States special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have held talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on ending Russia’s war against his country, marking their first visit to Kyiv since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. The meeting on Sunday came a day after the two met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. We have been waiting a long time for Steve and Jared, Witkoff and Kushner,” Zelenskyy said, thanking US President Donald Trump for “allowing them to come” despite the war.
After the meeting, Witkoff said the US team had been “very encouraged” by what he described as a “substantive, important” discussion. On his part, Kushner said Trump wanted “not just to figure out how we end the current war, but how do we create the right conditions and arrangements for a long-term, durable peace”. Earlier, Zelenskyy published a video of himself meeting Trump’s envoys in central Kyiv, saying, “Talks have begun.” Ukraine’s top security officials and negotiators were also present, along with several European national security advisers.
Zelenskyy said Europeans would participate in some of the talks with the US envoys. Several important sessions,” he said. The US envoys arrived in the Ukrainian capital by train from Poland, hoping to revive negotiations to end Europe’s worst conflict since World War II after a summer of heightened tensions.
While Witkoff and Kushner have visited Moscow eight times, they have never held talks in Kyiv until now. Zelenskyy took the US envoys to see Kyiv’s historic Saint Sophia’s Cathedral, which sits opposite the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) security building that was hit by a Russian drone on Friday. Moscow’s four-and-a-half-year invasion of Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.
Previous rounds of US-mediated peace talks encouraged by Trump, who campaigned on a promise to quickly end the war, have yielded few results. He suggested on Friday that the US had a fresh proposal, though he did not elaborate. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov described Saturday’s meeting in Moscow, which ran more than three hours, as “highly useful”, while a White House official told the news agency that the next steps would be announced in the coming weeks.
Ushakov called the talks “extremely frank”, saying the US team “put forward a number of ideas on possible routes to a settlement”, though he gave no details. In televised comments before those talks, Putin said Russia would ensure the safety of the envoys while in Kyiv. Earlier on Saturday, Putin had thanked Trump for persisting in his efforts to end the war despite it being “not simple”.
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