Witkoff and Kushner leave Kyiv with a three-day pause and no settlement

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner finished their first official visit to Kyiv on 7 September with a phrase they have used after every recent Moscow trip: significant progress, new ideas, more talks to come. What they actually extracted from the weekend was a 72-hour pause in strikes on the two capitals and a public push to revive a trilateral format that collapsed six months ago.

The pair sat with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Saturday for three hours and ten minutes, according to Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, then stayed for dinner. Ushakov called the session meaningful, constructive, extremely frank and trusting. Putin sent greetings to Donald Trump and said he had full trust in American mediation. Kushner opened in Russian with a greeting for Moscow City Day.

Witkoff thanked Putin for the release of former US Marine Robert Gilman and for agreeing to halt strikes on Kyiv while the Americans were in the country. The pause began at midnight Saturday Moscow time. Ukraine agreed not to hit Moscow. Fighting continued on the rest of the front. Ukrainian forces later said they had struck oil facilities in Ryazan, Perm and Tatarstan.

A White House official said staff from the National Security Council, State Department and Treasury joined the Kremlin meeting and that substantive plans for next steps would be announced in the coming weeks. No text of those plans was released in Kyiv or Moscow.

Three rounds in Kyiv

On Sunday the envoys held three rounds with Volodymyr Zelensky. National security advisers from Britain, France and Germany joined the last one. The agenda covered a return to talks with Russia, territory, security guarantees, air-defence stocks and support for Ukraine's power system before winter.

Zelensky said the discussions were good and that several new ideas were on the table. He did not name them. Witkoff said he was confident of a good resolution and that Washington wanted a diplomatic outcome rather than a kinetic one. He pointed to the E3 presence as proof that collaboration is required.

Kushner described the Kremlin session as constructive and substantive. He said the two sides had walked through why earlier formulas failed and what Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world could take from a settlement. Asked whether the United States would raise pressure on Moscow if the talks produced nothing, he said the American approach was to look for a win-win outcome.

Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon put a sharper question to Witkoff: whether Putin had been deceiving him across repeated meetings, and whether he found it acceptable to sit with a leader Gordon called a war criminal. Witkoff answered that Putin and his team had treated the Americans with respect and that relationships are critical to ending wars. He said his job with Kushner is to shrink the differences and keep a channel open.

What did not move

The core dispute is unchanged. Moscow still wants control of the Donbas, including the Ukrainian-held parts of Donetsk region. Kyiv still refuses to legalise that transfer. Those positions have blocked every public formula since early 2025.

Witkoff has now been to Moscow eight times since Trump returned to office. This was the first time he and Kushner accepted a Kyiv invitation. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, made a short Moscow stop two weeks earlier.

The weekend pause was negotiated in advance. Washington asked Ukraine to ease drone attacks on Moscow and on Russian energy sites while the envoys were in Russia, and asked Russia to hold back missiles aimed at Kyiv. Both sides agreed for three days. That is a travel arrangement, not a ceasefire.

Ukrzaliznytsia, the state railway, said the Americans had left Kyiv by Monday. Zelensky is expected to keep talking to them in a smaller format. Winter generation and air defence will sit on that list whether or not a trilateral table is rebuilt. The Donbas line will decide whether the table is worth setting.