Russian President Vladimir Putin is expecting Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner this Saturday, who are bringing him a proposal from U.S. President Donald Trump to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. The mission of the American envoys will be completed with a visit to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
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With this trip of his emissaries to the countries at war, Trump intends to reactivate mediation that he began shortly after assuming his second presidential term, in January 2025, which was interrupted last February when Israel and the U.S. began attacking Iran and the current war in the Middle East broke out.
The plane of the American messengers landed shortly before noon at Vnukovo, one of the four airports serving Moscow. There they were received by Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s special envoy for economic cooperation with the U.S., who in the last 18 months has held numerous meetings with Witkoff, both in the U.S. and in Russia.
This is an opportunity to relaunch U.S. mediation interrupted by the war against Iran
Trump acknowledged on Friday that his envoys “carry with them a proposal to end the war. Because I ended eight wars,” asserted the U.S. president.
The visit is a good opportunity to resume contacts to relaunch peace talks, which were abruptly interrupted when on February 28 Israel and the U.S. began bombing Iran. With Washington concerned about that important region of the world, the White House stopped paying attention to the Ukrainian dossier.
But beyond that, it does not seem that the trip of Trump’s men raises hopes of achieving a major immediate breakthrough. According to the Bloomberg agency in Kyiv, the Ukrainian side thinks that the U.S. representatives will again raise ideas already rejected by Moscow, particularly about transforming the Ukrainian Donbass region into a free economic zone. In fact, when journalists asked Trump if the peace proposal was new, the U.S. president replied: “No.”
Trump’s envoys requested security guarantees during their trip
The Kremlin maintains that the peaceful solution to the war must take into account the underlying causes of the crisis. In the summer of 2024, Putin cited among the conditions for a ceasefire that Ukraine renounce joining NATO and the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk (both forming Donbass), Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. This includes areas of these territories still controlled by Ukrainian troops. In Kyiv, they say this would be like a surrender and do not accept it.
For the resumption of contacts to begin smoothly, the U.S. mediators had asked both sides for security guarantees.
Two weeks earlier, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow, for which reason Washington asked Kyiv to cease its drone attacks against the Russian capital and other areas during his stay.
Witkoff and Kushner’s plane entered Russian airspace this Saturday from Finland without incident. Zelensky already announced on Friday night the temporary cessation of air bombings against Russian territory. “Russia must do the same (…) Our goal is for the visit and negotiations with the U.S. side to be as constructive and substantial as possible,” he said in his usual nightly message.
Putin acted similarly and this Saturday ordered a three-day halt to attacks against the Ukrainian capital. It is initially assumed that Trump’s emissaries will arrive in Kyiv this Sunday.
The Ukrainian side has been requesting for months that Trump’s envoys go to Kyiv. In the Ukrainian capital, it is upsetting that Trump’s envoys have gone to Moscow to talk regularly with Putin and have never visited Kyiv, which is considered an affront.
“Russian President, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin, ordered from midnight today and for three days not to launch attacks against Kyiv. This is related to the preparations for contacts of the (envoys) in Kyiv,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov officially announced to Russian agencies.
Peskov also indicated that Kyiv had informed Moscow of Zelensky’s decision to suspend attacks on Russia during the White House representatives’ trip.
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