Witkoff and Kushner leave Kyiv after three rounds with Zelenskyy

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held three rounds of talks in Kyiv on 6 September, their first official visit to Ukraine, a day after meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They left the city on 7 September. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the sessions very substantive. No ceasefire was announced.

Ukrainian officials Kyrylo Budanov, Rustem Umerov and Davyd Arakhamia met the Americans at the railway station. The envoys travelled by train. Zelenskyy thanked them in public remarks and joked that they had done a better job that day than Patriot batteries over the capital. He said Kyiv wants a dignified, reliable and lasting peace.

The first two rounds were bilateral. The third brought in national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany. Zelenskyy said the three sides had agreed to meet again. A venue has not been set. He listed air defence, including Patriot systems, a winter package for energy infrastructure, American liquefied natural gas in serious volume, long-term security guarantees and an economic plan for reconstruction.

On territory he was direct. The territorial issue remains relevant, he said, and the hardest questions can be settled only at the level of leaders. A strong Ukrainian army, in his account, is still one of the main security guarantees. He said the aim was a just peace that would leave no opening to resume aggression.

Witkoff told reporters the United States wants a diplomatic resolution, not a kinetic one. He said the Moscow meetings produced new ideas that the pair then carried to Kyiv. He has now seen Putin and his team about eight times. Both Ukraine and Russia, he said, still need to make compromises, but the ingredients for a deal exist. He said he was confident of a good resolution if trilateral talks resume. Kushner said Donald Trump wants more than an end to the current war. He wants conditions that last.

Earlier rounds sat in Abu Dhabi on 23-24 January and 4-5 February, then in Geneva on 17-18 February. Those talks stalled. The war is in its fifth year. The front is about 1,250 kilometres long. Russia has been using jet-powered drones against Ukrainian cities. Sirens are part of ordinary nights in Kyiv. Zelenskyy has said the fighting is likely to run into winter.

What moved on Sunday was the room, not the map. E3 advisers sat with the Americans and the Ukrainians. Territory was named as unfinished business for presidents. Energy and air defence were named as the winter file. Trilateral talks with Russia were named as the next instrument. None of that is a settlement. It is a sequence that did not exist on Friday, when Witkoff and Kushner were still in Moscow.

The test is whether a date appears for the promised Ukraine-United States-Europe meeting, and whether Moscow agrees to sit in a third chair. Until those two facts exist, Sunday's talks remain what both sides called them: encouraging, and incomplete.