Donald Trump's special envoy, businessman Steve Witkoff, and the US president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, landed this Saturday at noon in Moscow, the first leg of a trip that will also take them to kyiv in order to try to reactivate peace talks that have been in “a deep pause”, using the Kremlin's words, since the beginning of the year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the suspension of attacks against the Ukrainian capital for three days, starting tonight at midnight, due to the presence of American emissaries, as explained by his spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. The rest of the country will not be exempt from possible bombings.
In kyiv, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, also announced a pause in the bombings until Monday. Witkoff and Kushner are scheduled to go to the Ukrainian capital on Sunday.
Trump announced that his envoys will bring “a proposal to end the war.” Moscow, which emphasizes that it will not give up on its objectives, has shown itself to be more cautious after a year and a half of negotiations that have not reached any point. “More will be known when [the talks] take place,” Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, stated tersely on Friday.
Witkoff and Kushner have been to Moscow several times in the last year and a half, but this will be their trip to kyiv. According to several sources from the Kyiv Independent newspaper, his presence in the Ukrainian capital has been up in the air after Witkoff “began to worry” about the effect of that meeting on Putin's opinion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly praised Trump's efforts to jump-start negotiations with a new proposal. “It is important that the United States continues to actively participate,” said the president.
This Saturday's meeting had as a preamble the trip of the head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, to Moscow two weeks earlier. Only half-truths and interested leaks from both Governments have emerged from that visit. According to the Kremlin, Ratcliffe only met with those responsible for the Russian intelligence services. The Russian independent press claims that Putin refused to receive the head of the CIA when he heard that he was going to demand progress towards peace with Ukraine.
Russia has escalated its attacks against Ukraine in recent months and Putin does not hesitate to continue with his offensive to make kyiv capitulate. It has been an especially bloody summer for civilians. Furthermore, this Friday, Russian forces bombed the headquarters of the Ukrainian intelligence service [SBU], in the heart of the capital, on the eve of Witkoff's meeting with Putin. The bombing has been an unprecedented attack because for the first time since 2022, one of the sides has set its sights on a top position, in this case the head of the SBU, Oleksandr Poklad.
The last rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine under the mediation of the United States date back to February, days before the war unleashed by the United States and Israel against Iran. The last meeting was described as “tense” by the Russians, who demanded, and still demand, the handover of the entire Ukrainian region of Donbas as a precondition for a truce and a negotiation to negotiate peace.
The dialogue has been suspended since then. The Kremlin spokesman stated in June that Witkoff and Kushner, also negotiators in the Iran conflict, were “occupied with other matters at the moment.”
Witkoff, a businessman who is a friend of Trump, is not a career diplomat and the Kremlin has found in his inexperience a way to distance Washington from Ukraine and Europe. In Russia he is not considered a high-level negotiator, much less Trump's son-in-law. Moscow has used the bait of promises of future business that until now are smoke, such as the construction of a tunnel in the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska, concessions in the Arctic and the delivery of Ukrainian “rare earths” to Washington that were never heard from again.
The businessman last met with Putin in January. The negotiations had cooled down after Putin and Trump's bilateral summit in Alaska in August 2025. Washington never announced any agreement or signed any document, but since then the Russian leader has demanded compliance with the alleged promises made by the American at that meeting. It is what Russian propaganda calls “the spirit of Anchorage.”
