US Envoys Kushner and Witkoff Visit Ukraine to Discuss Peace with Zelenskyy

The US negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff travelled to Ukraine for the first time on Sunday for talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to end the war with Russia.

The Ukrainian president announced plans to widen peace discussions to include European countries in the near future, saying he wanted to do “everything to ensure that trilateral meetings take place” with Ukraine, the US and Europe.

Witkoff said he was hopeful such meetings would be announced “in short order”. The British, French and German national security advisers briefly joined Sunday’s talks.

Witkoff said the talks with Zelenskyy had been “very constructive and substantive”. Kushner said the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was “a long, hard and emotional war”.

There were otherwise few details from the highly anticipated talks between Washington and Kyiv, which came a day after the US envoys met Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow.

Kushner and Witkoff were forced to arrive in Kyiv by train after Russia bombed the city’s two main airports on Friday. Both countries pledged to refrain from attacking each other’s capitals over the weekend to ensure the US envoys’ safe passage.

Zelenskyy joked that the delegation should come more often to “protect our citizens who are in the capital”.

But the president’s mood was generally sombre. He said Ukraine was “really counting on a winter package” from the US and Europe to enable it to withstand another war-torn winter.

“We specifically discussed this with Steve and Jared, as well as with our European partners: air defence, energy support, and as you know we are counting on the serious use of LNG, American LNG,” he said, referring to liquefied natural gas.

Zelenskyy greeted the US envoys earlier in the day in Sophia Square, in front of Kyiv’s historic cathedral.

The cathedral is a few hundred metres away from the headquarters of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency, which was hit by a Russian drone on Friday afternoon, marking an escalation in a conflict that has dragged on for more than four and a half years.

Kushner said his team was in almost daily contact with Ukrainian officials. “Just because we haven’t travelled out, it doesn’t mean we haven’t … been communicating,” he said.

Expectations going into the talks were low. US-backed mediation has stalled over the past few months as Washington has been focused on the war with Iran. Many Ukrainians are also sceptical that Trump is committed to a peace agreement that is acceptable to Kyiv. “People don’t trust the Russians and people don’t trust Trump personally,” said Artem Bronzhukov, a political analyst.

Talks between Russia and Ukraine on ending the war have focused on a 20-point peace plan put forward by Washington and Kyiv in December. But the two sides have failed to reach common ground on several sticking points, including control of territory in east Ukraine.

“People mostly understand that if you step back from the Donbas, the next day or the next week, Putin will push for another condition,” Bronzhukov said.

A White House official said on Saturday that the talks with Moscow “discussed substantive plans for next steps” for ending the war and that an announcement would follow in the coming weeks.

The senior Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov described the talks as “extremely frank” and said there was an acknowledgement of the need to address “the root causes of the conflict”.

Kyiv and the surrounding areas have been hit by a barrage of daily drone strikes for more than a week, the most sustained attack on Ukraine’s capital in months.

The capital is now enjoying a reprieve from strikes and air raid alerts that had become a daily occurrence, but other parts of the country are still being hit. Ukrainian authorities reported on Sunday that at least eight people were killed and 69 injured across Ukraine in the past day.

Ukraine is facing a critical shortage of US-made Patriot interceptor missiles that can shoot down incoming threats. Many of the recent Russian strikes have been by new-model jet-powered drones that can reach speeds of 250mph, making them hard to intercept.

Many Ukrainians are worried about the war dragging on into a fifth year and are anxious about the winter ahead. This week, Zelenskyy’s defence technology adviser, Serhii Beskrestnov, told the Guardian that the government should consider evacuating elderly people from Kyiv as Putin had ordered the Russian military to “prepare and carry out mass strikes” on Ukraine’s energy facilities.

Russia and Ukraine have increased their use of long-range missiles in recent weeks in an effort to sap morale in each other’s countries.

Additional reporting by Illia Dyadik