Donald Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Kyiv on their first official visit to the Ukrainian capital, after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss ending the war. Kyiv and Moscow agreed to pause air strikes to allow the pair to deliver what Trump has called a proposal to end the war, but expectations of a breakthrough in Ukraine were low, and the Kremlin gave no answer to a Ukrainian ceasefire request for the duration of the trip.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Kyiv by train after holding talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday about how to end the war in Ukraine. Both Kyiv and Moscow agreed to pause air strikes to let the envoys bring what Trump has called a proposal to end the war.
First visit to Kyiv, but low expectations
The trip marked the pair's first official visit to the Ukrainian capital. They began talks with the Ukrainian negotiating team inside the St Sophia Cathedral complex in central Kyiv, according to the office of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy said ahead of the envoys' arrival that his team was ready for the conversation, and that peace, security guarantees and a dignified postwar settlement were needed.
Yet expectations were low in Ukraine that the visit would mark a step toward ending the four-year war. Oleksandr Merezhko, an MP in Zelenskyy's party who chairs parliament's foreign policy committee, called the fact that the envoys traveled to Moscow first a bad sign, suggesting the US could try to impose a pro-Putin plan on Ukraine. According to Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov, the Moscow talks, which lasted more than three hours, had been "timely and useful", though he gave no details on the substance of the US proposal.
Drone strikes overshadow the diplomacy
On Friday, a Russian jet-powered drone hit the headquarters of Ukraine's security service, directly across the street from the cathedral complex where the talks took place. For the past week, Russia has bombarded Kyiv with an unprecedented series of daytime drone attacks, triggering scores of daytime air raid alerts that disrupted the lives of the capital's more than 3.5 million residents. Five such alerts were declared on Saturday and one on Sunday.
Zelenskyy had earlier accused Russian forces of deliberately bombing Kyiv's two main civilian airports on Saturday to prevent Witkoff and Kushner from landing there. Senior officials told the Financial Times that the Kremlin did not respond to a Ukrainian proposal for a ceasefire covering the duration of the envoys' trip to Russia and Ukraine.
Escalation clouds ceasefire prospects
Putin has repeatedly insisted that any peace agreement must recognize the realities on the ground, and he has opposed a ceasefire as a prelude to peace talks, a longstanding Ukrainian demand. Prospects for a broader ceasefire have appeared increasingly remote as both sides escalated long-range strikes in recent months, targeting ships in the Black Sea as well as military and energy infrastructure.
He said on September 1 that he had ordered Russian forces to launch massive retaliation strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Ukraine's air force said the number of jet-powered drones launched against the country soared to 2,800 in August, from just 350 in June, as Ukrainian air defenses continue to struggle with a chronic shortage of the sophisticated US-built interceptors needed to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles.
Source: Financial Times
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