Steve Witkoff, United States envoy to the Middle East, will travel to the Kremlin next week as Washington intensifies its push for a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
The visit was confirmed on Wednesday by Yuri Ushakov, senior foreign policy aide to Vladimir Putin, and comes after Kyiv said it had reached a “common understanding” with the White House on the outline of a possible peace agreement.
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Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had instructed Witkoff to meet the Russian president. The US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll has also been dispatched to Ukraine. The moves follow the emergence last week of a 28 point draft peace plan which Trump said had now been “fine tuned with additional input from both sides.”
Before the Kremlin confirmed Witkoff’s trip, Trump told reporters that his son in law Jared Kushner may attend the Moscow talks. He said any agreement would involve land concessions “both ways” and efforts to “clean up the border.” The US president has made securing an end to the conflict a central foreign policy goal but insisted he had not set a deadline, saying “the deadline for me is when it is over.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly warned that it has not been consulted on the updated version of the plan. Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, said Moscow had been open to the initial outline but that the situation would be “fundamentally different” if substantial changes had been made, BBC reported.
Read also: Trump accuses Ukraine of ‘zero gratitude’ over US war support
As of Tuesday morning the Kremlin had still not received a copy of the revised draft, Lavrov said, accusing European governments of undermining US efforts. American officials have not publicly addressed the complaints, although Driscoll held two days of talks with Russian representatives in Abu Dhabi, according to the BBC.
Several core issues remain unresolved, including security guarantees for Kyiv and the future of contested regions in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he was ready to meet Trump to address “sensitive points” in the proposal and hoped the meeting could happen before the end of the month. “Much depends on America because Russia pays the greatest attention to American strength,” he said.
Zelensky added that the 28 point draft had been slimmed down, with some provisions removed. Ukraine had criticised elements of the original plan which included ceding territory it still controls, renouncing its ambition to join Nato and cutting the size of its armed forces. Those terms reflected long standing Kremlin demands and sparked immediate pushback from European leaders.
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On Sunday, ahead of talks in Geneva between American, European and Ukrainian officials, US senator Marco Rubio publicly insisted the draft was “authored by the US” after colleagues claimed he had suggested it was effectively a Russian document. Both Washington and Kyiv have since said progress is being made, with Zelensky calling the updated approach “the right one.”
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that the first version “was just a map” that required further work.
Both Russia and Ukraine reported new strikes on Tuesday night in Zaporizhzhia. Ivan Federov, the Ukrainian regional head, said at least seven people were injured. Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin backed governor in occupied areas, said Kyiv had hit energy infrastructure, leaving about forty thousand people without electricity.
