President Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, met with officials in Ukraine on Sunday in their first trip to the country and the second stop on a diplomatic tour aimed at reviving efforts to end the war between Ukraine and Russia.
Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner came straight from Moscow, where they spent several hours on Saturday with Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president. Arriving in Kyiv by train, they alighted on a platform bearing a sign that read, “PEACE EXPRESS,” and then were taken by motorcade to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The men discussed what were later said to include “new ideas,” though details were scant.
Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have traveled to Moscow several times but never before visited Kyiv, despite multiple official invitations.
“We have been waiting for Steve and Jared, Witkoff and Kushner, for a long time,” Mr. Zelensky told reporters before greeting the two with hugs on Sophia Square, where photos of fallen soldiers formed a somber backdrop.
The men met for about three hours. In the gilded halls of Mariinsky Palace, they briefly addressed journalists afterward — Mr. Witkoff said they were having a “great time” in Kyiv and called its hospitality “unsurpassed” — before entering another round of talks joined by national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany.
Emerging later, Mr. Witkoff said “we really feel good about” the conversations in Moscow and Kyiv. He said that both Russia and Ukraine still “need to make some compromises” but that “we think we have the ingredients to get to that place.”
Mr. Zelensky, seated onstage with him and Mr. Kushner, described the discussions as “positive” and “very substantial” even as he said “it appears at the moment” that Ukraine faces another winter of war.
The meetings come at a dangerous moment of escalation in the nearly five-year conflict. Russia and Ukraine have been waging an intensifying air war, at least in part to try to gain the upper hand in settlement talks.
That was reflected in the delicate discussions around the American envoys’ travel. The United States secured agreement that Ukraine and Russia would suspend attacks on each other’s capitals while the men were in those cities, according to officials familiar with the diplomatic effort.
That gave Kyiv residents a much-needed respite after days of nonstop air-raid alarms — which Mr. Zelensky acknowledged on Sunday in thanking the Americans for coming. Their visit, he joked, offered better protection than Patriot air defenses.
“Come more often,” he said.
Mr. Kushner called the temporary halt in strikes on Moscow and Kyiv “obviously a nice thing to have,” but said the Trump administration was focused on finding a framework for “durable peace.”
“We went through a lot of the ideas that hadn’t worked to date,” he told reporters, later adding that “there’s a lot of new ideas” being put forward. He did not provide further details.
Mr. Zelensky was similarly vague, saying that negotiators needed to analyze what were “several genuinely new ideas” before discussing them publicly.
Few were expecting a breakthrough from the envoys’ trip, which was billed as the first step toward reviving talks mediated by the Trump administration. Those are expected to resume late this month, days after the Russian parliamentary election and weeks before the U.S. midterm elections.
Mr. Trump returned to office last year pledging to end the war in Ukraine swiftly. He enlisted Mr. Witkoff and later Mr. Kushner to help with negotiations, which have unfolded in fits and starts.
By February, Mr. Witkoff and Russian and Ukrainian negotiators had whittled a 20-point peace plan to two key unresolved points: management of a Russian-occupied nuclear power plant and control of territory that Ukraine still holds in the eastern Donbas region.
Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, and the White House’s attention shifted away from Ukraine.
On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky said that the territorial issue had come up with the Americans, as had the subjects of security and economic guarantees for Ukraine after any settlement and “all the possibilities” for resuming negotiations.
He and the Americans expressed support for a return to the trilateral format for negotiations, with Mr. Kushner saying that “hopefully we’ll have progress on that very soon.”
Few in Ukraine, though, expect a speedy resolution. The Kremlin has not indicated it is ready to stop the fighting, and the Ukrainians say they expect Russian forces to try to inflict as much pain as possible during the winter in hopes of pummeling them into submission at the negotiating table.
Russian military gains have slowed in recent months. Yet one of the Kremlin’s foreign policy aides, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters that Mr. Putin, in his meeting with the Americans, emphasized that Russia’s forces were advancing and that they would achieve their goals.
Mr. Zelensky, in turn, said he made clear to the Americans on Sunday that Ukraine’s position on the battlefield had strengthened.
“This gives us the opportunity,” he told reporters, “to be more confident in any format of future discussions with the American side and, of course, with the Russian side.”
Stanislav Kozliuk contributed reporting.
The post Trump Envoys Make First Visit to Ukraine appeared first on New York Times.
