Top negotiators for President Trump plan to meet with Ukrainian officials in Florida on Sunday to discuss a possible peace settlement to halt Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior U.S. official.
The American negotiators who plan to attend the talks are Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for the president; and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a businessman who does some international diplomacy for Mr. Trump.
The meeting follows a round of talks between those officials and Ukrainian negotiators last weekend in Geneva. In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky is grappling with the fallout from a corruption investigation that led to the resignation on Friday of his top negotiator and chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. Mr. Yermak had participated in the Geneva talks, and had appeared with Mr. Rubio to discuss them with reporters.
Russian officials said earlier that Mr. Witkoff planned to travel to Moscow next week.
The recent diplomacy has become fraught because of questions about whether some of Mr. Trump’s aides are favoring the demands of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the expense of Mr. Zelensky and Ukrainians, whose country is besieged by the Russian military.
After Mr. Trump told them last month to make a push on resolving the war, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner drafted a 28-point proposal, incorporating Russian input. During the process, the two Americans met secretly in Miami with Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy for Mr. Putin who is in charge of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
The Americans also met in Florida this month with Rustem Umerov, the national security adviser to Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Umerov will be part of the Ukrainian group on Sunday, Mr. Zelensky said in a social media post on Saturday.
“The American side is demonstrating a constructive approach, and in the coming days it is feasible to flesh out the steps to determine how to bring the war to a dignified end,” Mr. Zelensky said in a separate social media post on Saturday, adding that the Ukrainians traveling to the United States had “the necessary directives.”
European allies and some U.S. lawmakers, including Republicans, expressed alarm after they learned that U.S. and Russian officials had worked together on a peace plan, and after the text of the proposal was leaked. Last Saturday, several U.S. senators said that Mr. Rubio had called them that day as he was flying to Geneva for talks and had told them that the plan had been composed by Russia.
Mr. Rubio then said that Ukrainians had also shared ideas for it. But he acknowledged to reporters in Geneva that U.S. officials had begun by looking at Russian demands, and received oral and written input from the Russians.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials expressed optimism about the talks after holding long rounds of discussions in Geneva last Sunday. Officials had whittled the 28-point proposal down, and Mr. Rubio said that items that involved NATO and European nations had been taken out and set aside for separate negotiations that would require European input. Mr. Zelensky said he would speak to Mr. Trump directly about “the sensitive issues,” which presumably include territory.
This week, leaked recordings and transcripts posted by Bloomberg News revealed separate, earlier conversations among Mr. Witkoff and Russian officials that raised questions about whether Mr. Witkoff was negotiating on behalf of the Russians, presenting their demands as American recommendations. Mr. Trump told reporters he had not listened to the recording, but said he was not concerned.
Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance had approved of the original 28-point proposal, and a friend of Mr. Vance, Daniel P. Driscoll, the Army secretary, has also been involved in the diplomacy this month. Some advocates of a pullback of U.S. military involvement from Ukraine say that it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to reach a settlement that Ukrainians and their supporters consider fair, but that it is important to try to bring an end to the war.
Despite European concerns over the peace talks, Mr. Rubio plans to take the highly unusual step of skipping a meeting of foreign ministers of NATO member nations in Brussels next week.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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