Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is reportedly “too scared” to travel to Kyiv for peace talks throwing planned negotiations into doubt, according to a report in the Kyiv Independent.
US negotiators are expected to visit Kyiv and Moscow in the coming days as Washington seeks to revive efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky previously said.
Russia’s Tass news agency afterwards said the visit by envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was supposed to take place on Saturday and Sunday.
The Kyiv visit has now been thrown into doubt amid claims that Witkoff is concerned about Russian warnings that he should not travel the Ukrainian capital, the Kyiv Independent reported.
"The Russians don't want them to come here to Kyiv, and Witkoff is always sensitive to Russian sentiment,” a source told the outlet. "They're being told there that it's dangerous."
The pair were due to arrive in Kyiv by plane, with the outlet previously reporting that Witkoff does not like taking the train to Kyiv.
Zelensky previously said it was “very important” that US negotiators continue to be active in peace talks.
Discussions on US negotiators going to Ukraine are ongoing, and the teams have spoken about September 6 as a possible date, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters news agency.
Russian news agency TASS reported earlier that US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would visit Russia and Ukraine on Saturday and Sunday.
A Ukrainian drone attack killed two people in Russia's western Bryansk region, the region's acting governor Yegor Kovalchuk Kovalchuk said on Telegram on Friday.
An attempt has been made to short-circuit an electricity grid transformer south of Duesseldorf in western Germany, according to police, the newspaper Bild reported on Friday, heightening a state of alert after two suspected sabotage attempts this week.
Police received a letter claiming responsibility for the incident in Dormagen as well as vandalism at a substation in nearby Bergheim that took 4,200 megawatts in generating capacity offline on Tuesday.
Germany has been the focus of European fears about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure this week.
Allies rallied round after Germany blamed a drone attack in August at Leipzig/Halle airport on Moscow as part of hybrid warfare meant to intimidate and divide countries that have supported Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Russia has dismissed the allegations as baseless.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that the possibility of a Ukraine peace settlement remained, but that there was no concrete basis for it right now.
He declined to confirm if US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were due to visit Moscow in the coming days.
A World Health Organization warehouse storing medical supplies in Ukraine has been struck during an air attack overnight in Kyiv Oblast, the WHO said on Friday.
"Access to the site remains restricted due to heavy smoke and safety concerns, while assessments of possible damage and stock losses are ongoing,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said. “No WHO personnel were affected.”
Air Tanzania said it was temporarily suspending flights from Dar es Salaam to Moscow from Friday. It has become the first airline to take this action after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned this week that the skies over Russia were unsafe.
Finland has said it is investigating whether a surveillance drone on the shore of its south coast has violated the Nordic country’s territory. An investigation launched by the Border Guard authority seeks to determine where, when and how the aircraft entered Finnish territory and how it possibly crossed Finland's border.
