Witkoff and Kushner leave Kyiv talking of trilateral talks, not a deal

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Kyiv by train on Sunday, their first official visit to Ukraine, a day after spending about three hours with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They met Volodymyr Zelensky first at the St Sophia Cathedral complex, then at Mariinsky Palace. Britain, France and Germany joined a third session. By evening both sides were calling the talks substantive. Neither side produced a ceasefire text.

Witkoff told reporters he had heard "new ideas" in Moscow that he would not describe. He said the envoys hoped a new round of U.S.-mediated talks among Ukraine, Russia and the United States would be announced "in short order." Kushner said President Donald Trump wanted more than an end to the current fighting. He wanted "the right conditions and arrangements for a long-term, durable peace." Zelensky called the conversation "very substantive" and said Ukraine was ready for a trilateral format.

The choreography of the weekend was the concrete product. Washington asked Ukraine to pause strikes on Moscow and Russia to pause strikes on Kyiv while the envoys were in those cities. Zelensky committed publicly on Friday evening. The Kremlin then announced a three-day pause on strikes against Kyiv. Zelensky also said Ukraine was ready, through Monday, to refrain from strikes on Moscow. The pair still had to take the train into Kyiv. Zelensky noted that Russian strikes had made an arrival by air unwise even though Ukrainian airports were technically ready.

Kyrylo Budanov, Rustem Umerov and Davyd Arakhamia met the Americans at the station. Zelensky later joked that the visit had done "an even better job today than the Patriot systems" for people in the capital. He also put a winter list on the table: air defence, energy support, and "a serious volume" of American liquefied natural gas before Russia resumes its usual campaign against the power grid.

People familiar with the talks told the Financial Times that the Americans carried updated versions of earlier peace documents, rewritten after talks stalled in February when the United States went to war with Iran. Previous rounds were held in Abu Dhabi on 23-24 January and 4-5 February, then in Geneva on 17-18 February. Those sessions produced no settlement. Witkoff has been to Moscow eight times in the past year and a half. Sunday was the first time he and Kushner set foot in Kyiv in an official capacity since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov described Saturday's Moscow session as "extremely frank" and said it ran in a working format and over dinner. Putin had ordered the Kyiv pause shortly before the Americans arrived. Hours before that announcement, Russian strikes were reported in Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Kyiv regions, killing at least five people, according to local authorities. Russian air defences claimed 258 Ukrainian drones overnight. Ukraine, for its part, has kept hitting Russian oil sites when it can.

Few people in Kyiv expect a breakthrough from a single weekend. Zelensky has said a window exists before the United States turns to the 2028 presidential election. Trump has framed the trip as part of a record of ending wars. The envoys left talking about process: a possible return to three-party talks, a winter support package, and ideas they will not put on paper yet. The three-day pause on the two capitals expires at the start of the working week. What happens to those cities on Tuesday is the first test of whether Sunday's language survives contact with the front.

The war is in its fifth year. The Iran conflict has pulled American attention and munitions south. That is the changed circumstance the revised papers are meant to reflect. Whether Moscow will sit in a room with Kyiv and Washington again is now the question Witkoff asked the press to wait on. He said he felt good about the conversations in both capitals. Feeling good is not a timetable.