Russian President Vladimir Putin awaits Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner this Saturday, who are bringing to Moscow a proposal from US President Donald Trump to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. The mission of the American envoys will be completed with a visit to Kyiv to meet with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.
With this trip by his emissaries to countries at war, Trump intends to reactivate a mediation that began shortly after assuming his second presidential term, in January 2025, and that was interrupted last February, when Israel and the US began to attack Iran and the current war in the Middle East broke out.
The American courier plane landed after noon in Vnukovo, one of the four airports serving Moscow. There they were received at the foot of the stairs by Kiril Dimitriev, the Kremlin's special envoy for economic cooperation with the United States, who in the last 18 months has held numerous meetings with Witkoff, both in the United States and in Russia.
Trump acknowledged on Friday that his envoys "carry with them a proposal to end the war. Because I put an end to eight wars," the US president said.
The visit is a good opportunity to resume contacts to relaunch the peace talks, which were abruptly interrupted when the Israeli and US bombings against Iran began on February 28. With Washington concerned in that important region of the world, the White House stopped paying attention to the Ukrainian dossier.
But beyond that it does not seem that the trip of Trump's men raises hopes of achieving an immediate breakthrough. According to the Bloomberg agency in Kyiv, the Ukrainian side thinks that the American representatives are going to re-raise ideas already rejected by Moscow, in particular, regarding the transformation of the Ukrainian region of Donbass into a free economic zone. In fact, when reporters asked Trump if the peace proposal was new, the US president responded: “No.”
The Kremlin maintains that a peaceful solution to the war must take into account the underlying causes of the crisis. In the summer of 2024, Putin cited among the conditions of the ceasefire that Ukraine renounce joining NATO and the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk (both form the Donbass), Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. That includes the areas of these territories still controlled by Ukrainian troops. In Kyiv they assure that this would be like a surrender and they do not accept it.
In order for the resumption of contacts to begin smoothly, the American mediators had asked both sides for security guarantees.
Two weeks earlier, the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, traveled to Moscow, for which reason Washington asked Kyiv to cease its drone attacks against the Russian capital and other areas during his stay.
Witkoff and Kushner's plane entered Russian airspace this Saturday from Finland without incident. Zelensky already announced on Friday night the provisional cessation of aerial bombardments against Russian territory. “Russia must do the same (...) Our goal is for the visit and negotiations with the American side to be as constructive and substantial as possible,” he commented in his usual nightly message.
Putin acted in the same way and this Saturday ordered the attacks against the Ukrainian capital to cease for three days. In principle, Trump's emissaries are supposed to arrive in Kyiv this Sunday.
The Ukrainian side has been asking for Trump's envoys to go to Kyiv for months. The Ukrainian capital is upset that Trump's envoys have gone to Moscow to speak with Putin regularly and have never visited Kyiv, which is considered a grievance.
"The Russian president, the supreme commander of the Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin, ordered starting at midnight today and for three days not to launch attacks against Kyiv. This is related to the preparations for the contacts of the American (envoys) in Kyiv," Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov officially announced to Russian agencies.
Peskov also indicated that Kyiv had informed Moscow of Zelensky's decision to suspend attacks on Russia during the trip of White House representatives.
