A U.S. delegation will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday for high-stakes talks on a revamped peace proposal that may have more of a chance to succeed where so many have failed before, due to new pressures on Ukraine.
As President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner headed to Moscow, the Kremlin flexed its muscles by announcing new military victories. Putin appeared in a video clad in military fatigues receiving reports from army commanders claiming their forces had taken Pokrovsk, which has stubbornly held out against Russian onslaughts for over a year.
Ukraine has said fierce fighting is still underway and open-source intelligence maps suggest Russia does not fully control the town. If Russia were to capture Pokrovsk, often dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, it could use the city as a base to advance on the rest of the Donetsk region.
Russian analysts called the footage “a show for Witkoff,” and it promotes a familiar line: Russia is prepared to outlast Ukraine on the battlefield unless it secures a deal that satisfies the Kremlin, regardless of the losses.
In a Telegram post, pro-Kremlin political commentator Sergei Markov said these “fantastic successes of the Russian army” would be heard by Witkoff and he “will pass it on to Trump.” After saying at one point that Ukraine could retake its territory, Trump in recent weeks has repeated that Russian line that Ukraine’s military defeat is inevitable.
The initial 28-point draft — leaked to the media last month and later presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by the U.S. side — included concessions to Moscow that crossed several of Kyiv’s red lines, triggering backlash from Ukraine and its allies. Zelensky and his top advisers have launched a diplomatic push to secure broader support for a more favorable deal, after Trump dropped the original Thanksgiving deadline for Ukraine to accept the plan.
Even though the U.S. delegation is now in Moscow, the Ukrainians have not entirely signed off on the deal. Over the weekend, Witkoff, Kushner and Secretary of State Marco Rubio held talks in Florida with Ukrainian top security official Rustem Umerov. Afterward, both sides said that significant work remains.
“This is delicate. It’s complicated,” Rubio told reporters in Florida after hours of discussions with Ukrainian officials.
Zelensky then visited Paris on Monday to brief and garner support from European leaders who worry that a deal placing a large share of Ukraine’s long-term security on Europe is being negotiated without their input.
“The main focus was on negotiations to end the war and on security guarantees. Peace must become truly durable,” Zelensky said in a social media post Monday, after an hours-long briefing with French President Emmanuel Macron, during which they held calls with leaders of Britain, Germany, Poland and Italy.
In Paris, Zelensky said the latest version of the peace proposal “looks better” but that it was “not over yet.” Standing alongside him, Macron said there was “no finalized peace plan to speak of today” and repeated that any territorial decisions are for Kyiv to make.
Talks with Macron and other European leaders are “aimed at demonstrating European support for Kyiv’s position,” Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group consultancy, said in an analysis note.
He said “a quick ceasefire remains unlikely despite ongoing U.S.-led talks,” as Russia and Ukraine are expected to “continue to maneuver for favorable ceasefire terms that will be unacceptable to the other side.”
So far, a deal Moscow might accept has been unacceptable to Kyiv and vice versa, bringing all involved parties to an impasse over how to bring the conflict to an end. Moscow demands Ukrainian troops withdraw from the entire Donbas region, which includes Donetsk, and to enshrine NATO’s non-expansion to the east, while Ukraine rules out ceding land Russia hasn’t been able to take militarily or agreeing to a deal that does not give it strong and lasting security guarantees.
At a joint news conference Monday with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stressed that neither leader would accept a “dictated peace” for Ukraine without full participation by both Ukrainians and Europeans.
But as the White House presses ahead with its negotiation bid without the Europeans at the table, Rubio is expected to skip a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels this week, according to two NATO diplomats. It was not exactly clear why Rubio planned to miss the Wednesday meeting, but his absence has added to the unease among European officials at NATO at a key moment in talks on ending the war in Ukraine.
U.S. attempts to broker a settlement between Russia and Ukraine over the past year had increasingly resembled a diplomatic Groundhog Day — a cycle in which each burst of activity ended with Moscow refusing to budge on its maximalist demands.
Witkoff’s third attempt to get Putin to sign off on a deal and grant Trump peacemaking laurels would probably have met the same fate as the previous two, but recent developments within Ukraine may have shifted positions, argued Tatiana Stanovaya, an expert at the Carnegie Eurasia Center.
Zelensky has become embroiled in a high-level corruption scandal that led to the resignation of his longtime and controversial adviser Andriy Yermak, weakening Kyiv’s position in negotiations with Washington. Ukraine is also facing economic pressure to sustain the war effort. European leaders have been struggling to unlock fresh funds for Kyiv now that the flow of U.S. money has stopped, while Zelensky is trying to push Europe to tap into Russian frozen assets.
Meanwhile, Witkoff and Kushner, fresh off brokering a deal in Gaza a few weeks earlier, albeit under vastly different circumstances, have shifted their attention to a peace plan to end a war that has long frustrated Trump, who initially vowed to end it in 24 hours.
“Now the Trump administration — which has a difficult relationship with Zelensky, to put it mildly — is seeking to take advantage of Kyiv’s mounting problems to restart talks on conditions that are more favorable to Moscow …” Stanovaya said in a recent analysis. “Indeed, the current negotiations have taken on a different tenor. Given the West’s unwillingness to enter the war on Ukraine’s side, the conversation is now dominated by the question of what price Kyiv will be forced to pay to end the fighting.”
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, shared concern that the Russian side will send Witkoff back “with a counterproposal which Witkoff will screw up and make it sound like it’s a great deal.”
“And the Russians will do this to keep this agonizing process ongoing.” Even more likely, he added, is that Putin will try to reset the discussion to the original 28 points that the Ukrainians modified. “And then this just falls apart.”
Russia, meanwhile, is facing increasing financial strain as falling oil revenue and a widening budget deficit push the government toward steep tax increases on citizens and businesses next year.
“It’s a big system with a lot of resources and can disintegrate for quite some time,” said political analyst Ekaterina Schulmann. “But the moment everybody got tired of asking when Putin will run out of money is also the moment when it became interesting to look into again.”
Russia’s newly approved three-year federal budget reveals not only a significant deficit, Schulmann argued, but also “frantic attempts by every department to pull extra money out of somewhere.”
Russian state oil and gas revenue are projected to fall in November by around 35 percent year-on-year to $6.59 billion, due to cheaper oil and a stronger ruble, adding pressure to Moscow’s war chest.
Last week, Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, reported that its net income for the first nine months of the year had fallen 70 percent compared with the same period in 2024. The company said additional pressure came from increased spending on “anti-terror security,” an apparent reference to continuous Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries.
Aaron Wiener, Catherine Belton and Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.
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