President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff said Thursday that he had secured Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agreement for European officials to join the next round of talks on ending Moscow’s war in Ukraine, but there were signs of a looming impasse in the negotiations.
Russia has resisted direct European involvement in the talks, accusing them of being a “party to the war” for backing Ukraine. And Putin has voiced even greater opposition to plans developed by the Europeans and Trump administration to guarantee Ukraine’s postwar security.
“The Europeans will join at the next meeting, which we think is a very big deal, because it’s important — they are our partners, and it’s important for them to be involved,” Witkoff told reporters in Moscow, where he traveled to meet Putin along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The pair of U.S. envoys visited the Kremlin directly from Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, where they led the first direct negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in nine months. Separately, the U.S. negotiators also met in Abu Dhabi with the Ukrainian team and with European officials.
But while Putin welcomed Trump’s envoys in the Russian capital Thursday, he appeared once again to dig in on the question of a postwar security arrangement for Ukraine, flatly rejecting the idea of European troops being deployed to the country as peacekeepers.
“From the very beginning, we have stated that the presence of foreign troops in Ukraine is absolutely unacceptable to us. We believe it poses a threat to Russia’s security,” Putin said. “The Europeans are aware of this. And what do we hear from them? That once a peace agreement is reached, they will immediately deploy troops to Ukraine?”
“What does that mean,” Putin continued. “For us, that constitutes a legitimate military target. The war would resume instantly.”
After a meeting in Alaska between Trump and Putin in August 2025 in which the U.S. president seemed on the verge of granting major concessions at Ukraine’s expense, European leaders raced to the White House and reached a deal on a postwar security plan acceptable to Kyiv.
That plan called for the United States to provide air power and intelligence support, while French President Emmanuel Macron said 26 nations — which he did not name — had pledged to enforce any truce, including by deploying a “reassurance force” to Ukraine.
Witkoff at the time said that Trump was prepared even to provide Ukraine with direct protection similar to its commitment to defend NATO allies.
“The United States is potentially prepared to be able to give Article 5 security guarantees, but not from NATO — directly from the United States and other European countries,” Witkoff said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview, referring to NATO’s collective-defense clause, in which an attack on one ally is regarded as an attack on all.
Putin, however, rejected all of those ideas, and the pace of Russia’s war never slowed.
On the tarmac at Vnukovo Airport on Thursday, as they prepared to leave Moscow, Kushner described the talks with Putin as productive. “I think overall, very fulsome and detailed discussions on all the topics, which I think will inform, hopefully, the next multilateral discussions,” he said.
Ahead of the talks in Abu Dhabi, Kushner said that the United States was prepared to lead a broad discussion about a new European security order.
Those comments alarmed some Europeans because they echoed Russian talking points in late 2021 and early 2022, before Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian officials then insisted that their security was threatened by Ukraine and NATO’s eastward expansion — claims that then-President Joe Biden flatly rejected.
The Europeans have resisted the idea of a new Kremlin-dictated security architecture, stressing that negotiations on postwar security should take place only after a ceasefire is declared in Ukraine, with the fighting frozen along current battle lines.
A delegation of high-ranking European officials ― including from France, Germany, Britain and Italy ― went to Abu Dhabi, but they were not part of the talks with Russia. The Kremlin’s top negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said it wasn’t clear “what we could talk about with them.”
After the meeting Thursday with Putin, it also was not clear who could join the future talks announced by Witkoff, or in what format those negotiations might occur. And some European leaders questioned whether such discussions would yield anything useful.
“There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Europe had a functioning European security architecture until it was first gradually undermined and ultimately destroyed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said European Council President António Costa, who will chair a meeting of the European Union’s 27 heads of state and government in Dublin on Friday.
“Any future discussion on this issue must take that into account,” Costa said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned his European supporters that the United States and Russia already were discussing the matter. Zelensky said that there was “a lot of talk about security guarantees” during the Abu Dhabi talks and that “Europe really needs to pay attention.”
“When the Americans and Russians talk about these, it’s not just about … Ukraine,” Zelensky said Thursday. “In fact, it’s more about some kind of new security framework between Europe and Russia, and we find this approach a bit strange.”
Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal said Europe was being led into “a trap” of debating about selecting an envoy and talking about the continent’s security architecture in return for a seat at the table. Michal said that Putin has long sought to roll back NATO’s posture and that this was the latest “tactic to ask for everything impossible.”
“Right now, we are in the trap,” Michal told reporters. “European matters are inside European and inside NATO matters, not to be discussed with Russia.”
At a briefing after the U.S. envoys left the Russian capital, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov did not explicitly confirm that Russia would sit down at the table with a delegation from Europe.
“Russia is ready to begin discussions immediately, together with the United States, on proposals concerning European security,” Ushakov said. “The current European security system is not working, and we hope that the Europeans will support a new architecture of indivisible security, which Russia and the United States are prepared to establish.”
Ushakov also said that Putin will continue to hold further discussions about the war in Ukraine with Trump at a planned meeting next week in China.
The Kremlin’s demands for a greater say in Europe’s security arrangements are not new. Its wish list was laid out in ultimatums to the U.S. and NATO in early 2021. While making those demands, Russian officials repeatedly insisted no invasion was planned.
Ukraine long has insisted that without security guarantees backed by Western military power, it would remain vulnerable to future Russian attacks. Russia, however, has insisted that Ukraine never join NATO.
Experts said there was a wide gap in expectations. “Putin wants a demarcation with Europe and the establishment of a completely different relationship with it than the one Europe envisions,” said Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov.
“Europe is not prepared to join negotiations with an agenda that interests Moscow,” Pastukhov added. “Moscow has no desire for such talks and does not want them clouding its game with the U.S. or its conflict with Ukraine. That is why it is keeping Europe out.”
In his remarks Thursday, Putin told Witkoff and Kushner that he would like them “and the American administration as a whole to work with your European allies, so that they might finally decide what it is they want — peace or war in Ukraine.”
In the run-up to the Abu Dhabi talks, Russian officials portrayed Europe as the key obstacle to Ukraine making concessions to Russia’s territorial and other demands. Previously, Russia had portrayed the Biden administration as that obstacle, while it viewed Trump as more pliant.
After the Trump administration largely halted direct U.S. financing and military aid for Ukraine, European governments stepped in to become the chief providers of economic and military aid, helping Kyiv to defend against the continuing Russian onslaught.
“Other meetings will follow, in which it will surely become even more obvious that, given the constructive attitude of Russia and the U.S., the problem comes down solely to the position of the E.U., on which Kyiv is entirely dependent,” Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev said of the results in Abu Dhabi.
For the first time since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow sees an opening “that could address what it calls the ‘root causes’ of the war,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in a post on X.
“The Kremlin thinks the opportunity is worth pursuing, even though its expectations for this round are low,” Stanovaya said. “If the talks fail, Russia is prepared to keep fighting until another opening presents itself.”
Russia’s readiness to keep fighting was voiced Wednesday by Medinsky, the head of Russia’s delegation in Abu Dhabi, who said that Russia will retake “every inch of its land one way or another” — a reference to territory in eastern Ukraine that the Kremlin claims to have annexed.
Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.
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