Donald Trump's envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, arrived in kyiv this Sunday, on their first official visit to the Ukrainian capital, in an attempt to reactivate a peace process that had been practically frozen since January. Their landing marks a new phase in US mediation efforts, a day after Kushner and Witkoff traveled to Moscow to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting that lasted more than three hours.
kyiv has so far rejected Russia's maximalist demand that Ukraine withdraw from the parts of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions that remain under Ukrainian control. Washington's push to end the fighting had lost steam as American attention has focused, for the past six months, on the Iran war.
Putin's foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, described Saturday's meeting as "constructive, frank and useful," the Kremlin's usual formula for meetings that have unlocked nothing substantive. According to Ushakov, much of the conversation revolved around "economic issues and potential large, mutually beneficial joint projects" between Russia and the United States — a detail that suggests that Moscow is negotiating with an eye toward normalizing its relationship with Washington, beyond the Ukrainian conflict itself. Regarding the war, Russia limited itself to offering its "comprehensive assessment" of the situation on the front, with no known changes in its territorial demands.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his willingness to have a "constructive" dialogue with US representatives. "Peace is needed. Security guarantees are needed. A just and sustainable peace is needed after the war. Our proposals are ready," he wrote on Telegram.
A pause that has not stopped the war
On the ground, the truce agreed between Putin and Zelensky – limited to not attacking Moscow and Kiev – has not prevented both armies from continuing to fight on the rest of the front. During the night from Saturday to Sunday, Russia launched 108 drones and six missiles against Ukraine, of which Ukrainian defenses intercepted 82 and all of the missiles; Ukraine, for its part, launched 258 drones that Russia claims to have shot down over fourteen regions, occupied Crimea and the Black and Azov Seas. The attacks left at least one dead in the Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia, where a 74-year-old man was killed by a drone attack that also injured three other people, and one civilian dead and a woman seriously injured in the Russian border region of Belgorod, after a Ukrainian drone hit a vehicle. In the Khmelnytskyy region, seven people were injured when a drone damaged an apartment building.
Skepticism in the streets
In the Ukrainian capital, dozens of people gathered this Sunday at nine in the morning for the daily minute of silence in memory of the fallen soldiers, a ritual that is repeated in cities across the country. Among them, Natalia Lipei, 67, whose son Víktor died in December 2022, travels from city to city despite a health problem to participate in the tribute. "I hope that these steps and these meetings give results once and for all, because there has been so much bloodshed and so many deaths here that we have to stop all this," he told the Associated Press.
