Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner set foot in Kyiv on Sunday for the first time since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, arriving less than a day after a Kremlin meeting with Vladimir Putin that stretched past three hours. The back-to-back stops mark the most visible leg yet of a renewed American push to get Moscow and Kyiv back to the same table. Sunday's Kyiv session wasn't a two-way conversation. It expanded into a third round with British, French and German officials also in the room.
- Sunday was the first time either envoy had set foot in Kyiv since the war began, a visit Al Jazeera and CNN both frame as a milestone in Washington's renewed mediation effort.
- The Moscow meeting with Putin ran past three hours on Saturday; Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov called the exchange serious, candid and productive.
- Moscow and Kyiv each agreed to pause strikes on the other's capital around the visit, though the two truces don't run on quite the same clock.
- Sunday's Kyiv talks stretched to three rounds, the last of which pulled in British, French and German diplomats — a detail confirmed by Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov and largely missing from other write-ups of the weekend.
- Kushner is pushing to revive the trilateral negotiating format last used roughly six months ago, after three earlier rounds in Abu Dhabi and Geneva failed to resolve the core disputes over territory and security guarantees.
A Capital That Had Never Hosted Them
The envoys' plane touched down first in Rzeszow, Poland, before the pair continued overland into Ukraine, arriving at a Kyiv rail station on Sunday morning. President Volodymyr Zelensky met them soon after, and both sides later called the conversation substantive.
It's the pair's first stop in the war-battered capital since Donald Trump returned to office pledging to end the conflict, and it lands at a moment when Washington's diplomatic attention had been pulled largely toward the separate Iran crisis in recent months.
Inside the Kremlin: Three Hours, No Breakthrough
The Moscow leg came first. Putin welcomed the envoys in a ceremony carried on Russian state television, greeting them with a blunt assessment: "The situation is, of course, not simple."
The closed-door session that followed ran past three hours without any announced breakthrough. Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov subsequently briefed reporters that the two delegations had floated a broad menu of settlement options, characterizing the exchange as serious, candid and productive. He added that Putin pressed the envoys on resolving what the Russian leader called the underlying drivers of the war, and that Moscow remains confident it can still seize what's left of eastern Ukraine by force.
Kirill Dmitriev, a senior Russian official who also sat in on the talks, called the Moscow leg an "important peacemaking visit." Witkoff, for his part, passed along Trump's well wishes to Putin, who reciprocated and pledged that Russia would do everything it could to keep the mediators safe during their trip.
A Truce With Two Different Clocks
Around the negotiations, both governments agreed to briefly stand down, though not on identical terms. Moscow's pause was ordered to start at midnight Saturday and run three full days, sparing Kyiv through roughly midweek. Kyiv's reciprocal pledge, laid out by Zelensky, covered the rest of Saturday plus Sunday and Monday, meaning Ukraine's halt on Moscow ends a bit sooner than Russia's halt on Kyiv.
The pause hasn't touched the wider war. Overnight Saturday, Russian strikes elsewhere in Ukraine left at least seven dead — several of them on Kyiv's outskirts — and injured a further 41 people nationwide, according to Ukrainian officials. A Ukrainian drone strike, meanwhile, killed one person and wounded another in Russia's Belgorod region, according to local authorities.
In Kyiv, an Expanded Table
Witkoff told reporters in Kyiv he was confident there would be a good outcome, while Zelensky said the talks had surfaced several new ideas without detailing what they were.
What's largely gone unreported elsewhere: Sunday's session in Kyiv wasn't a single sitdown. It ran through two rounds of U.S.-Ukraine discussion before widening into a third round that pulled in diplomats from Britain, France and Germany, according to the man who runs Ukraine's presidential office, Kyrylo Budanov. That widening suggests Washington is looping European capitals into a process some had worried was being negotiated around them.
Pushing to Restart the Three-Way Format
Kushner used the joint appearance to push for restarting three-way negotiations, arguing the format lets Kyiv and Moscow speak directly rather than through Washington as a go-between. He pointed to the earlier rounds of that format — three in total, held in Abu Dhabi in late January and early February and in Geneva in mid-February — where delegations reportedly negotiated in a collegial atmosphere, often conversing in Russian without an interpreter. Framing the broader effort in Trump's terms, Kushner called Ukraine's war "a very worthy problem worth solving."
What Hasn't Moved
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv has budged on the disputes that stalled those three earlier rounds: the future of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas and the shape of binding Western security guarantees. Trump had teased the trip on Friday, calling his envoys skilled dealmakers carrying a plan to end the war and suggesting the odds of success were reasonably good.
Analysts watching from Moscow describe the Kremlin as approaching this round with less pessimism than earlier visits — not because expectations are high, but because past trips by the same pair produced so little movement that Russian officials see limited downside, while Putin continues to bet that battlefield momentum still favors his side.
Whether the weekend's diplomacy adds up to a formal restart of three-way talks is still an open question. Both sides described the visit as progress, but the absence of any announced date for a new trilateral round, combined with strikes that continued well outside the narrow capital truce, suggests the war's hardest questions remain unresolved. For now, the clearest deliverable from a weekend heavy on statements and light on specifics is a fragile, temporary quiet over two capitals — and a newly widened table in Kyiv that could shape whatever comes next.
