Putin Welcomes US Envoys to Moscow for Ukraine Deal Discussions

Russian President Vladimir Putin held late-night talks with senior United States envoys in Moscow on Thursday as diplomatic efforts intensified to end the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine. The Kremlin said the meeting took place shortly before midnight and focused on proposals aimed at resolving the conflict, the deadliest in Europe since World War II.

The US delegation included special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, accompanied by Josh Gruenbaum, who was recently appointed by President Donald Trump as a senior adviser to his Board of Peace, a body tasked with pursuing solutions to international conflicts. Putin was joined by his long-time foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov and special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, reflecting the high-level nature of the discussions.

The talks came after Trump said a peace deal was “reasonably close”, while Witkoff indicated negotiations had narrowed down to a single unresolved issue. Footage released by the Kremlin showed Putin greeting the three Americans and inviting them to sit at a long oval table inside the Kremlin, underscoring the symbolic importance of the meeting.

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Territorial control remains the most contentious issue in the negotiations. Russia has demanded that Ukraine relinquish territory it still holds in the eastern Donetsk region, a condition Kyiv has firmly rejected after years of costly fighting. Moscow has also insisted that Ukraine abandon its ambition to join NATO and has opposed any post-war deployment of NATO forces on Ukrainian soil.

The US envoys arrived in Moscow from Davos, Switzerland, where they met Ukrainian officials earlier in the week. President Trump also met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday. Zelenskiy later said that security guarantees for Ukraine had been finalised in principle, though the question of territory remained unresolved.

As Ukraine faces its harshest winter of the war amid heavy Russian missile and drone strikes on energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy described upcoming trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in Abu Dhabi as a positive step. Trump, when asked about his message to Putin, reiterated his position simply: “The war has to end.”

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