KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held “encouraging” talks in Kyiv on Sunday in their first official visit to Ukraine as part of a renewed push to end more than 4½ years of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The trip by the Americans follows a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, as both sides have escalated their aerial attacks. Washington’s push to end the fighting has lost momentum, with the Trump administration focused for the past six months on the Iran war.
Russia has recently been using fast-flying, jet-powered drones, and the recurring wail of air-raid sirens has become part of daily life in Kyiv. Troops have struggled to make progress along the 1,250-kilometer (775-mile) front line.
Following two rounds of discussion with the U.S. officials, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the goal was a “just, fair peace” that would ensure there was “never an opportunity to resume aggression against Ukraine.”
He also thanked the American negotiators, who traveled by train, for coming to Kyiv, their first time in Ukraine. Zelenskyy said the next round of talks later Sunday would bring in national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany.
“We’ve had very meaningful discussion, substantive, important, and we’re very encouraged,” Witkoff said.
Kushner said that President Donald Trump sees it as important “not just to figure out how do we end the current war,” but how do create the conditions for durable peace.
A senior Ukrainian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that much of the discussion was focused on “how to get through the winter and what can be done before then.”
No breakthroughs in Moscow talks
Saturday’s meeting in Moscow lasted more than three hours behind closed doors and ended without any major developments being announced. Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, described the talks as constructive, frank and useful, but he didn’t discuss specific outcomes.
While Moscow offered its “comprehensive assessment” of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, Ushakov said, the talks weren’t purely focused on the war in Ukraine.
“Economic issues and potentially large, mutually beneficial joint projects for Russia and America were discussed in considerable detail,” he said.
The last known visit to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was in January when they also held talks with Putin at the Kremlin.
Russia and Ukraine continue to exchange fire
Putin and Zelenskyy had agreed to pause strikes on each other’s capitals while the talks take place. Still, the two traded fire overnight into Sunday, officials said.
Russian attacks across multiple Ukrainian regions killed one person and wounded at least 10 others overnight into Sunday, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
In Zaporizhzhia, drone strikes killed a 74-year-old man and wounded three people, while a drone damaged an apartment building, wounding seven people, in the Khmelnytskyi region.
Ukraine’s air force said Sunday that it intercepted 82 drones out of the 108 launched by Russia overnight, along with six missiles.
In Russia, a man was killed and a woman was seriously wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a vehicle, local authorities in the Belgorod border region said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Sunday that its air defenses overnight shot down 258 Ukrainian drones over 14 Russian regions, the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula and the waters of the Black and Azov Seas.
Mixed hopes on the ground
In Kyiv on Sunday, dozens gathered for a nationwide 9 a.m. moment of silence honoring Ukraine’s fallen soldiers, a daily ritual held in cities across the country.
Nataliia Lipei, 67, whose son Viktor was killed in December 2022, was among those who attended. Despite a health condition, she has traveled from city to city to take part, and she said that she hopes the talks in Moscow and Kyiv will finally bring an end to the war.
“I hope these steps and these meetings will definitely produce results, because there has been so much bloodshed and so many deaths here that we have to stop all of this,” Lipei told The Associated Press.
Not everyone shared her hope for the talks. Oleksandr Pastukhov, a 27-year-old video editor who joined the commemoration, was skeptical that the envoys’ visit would change anything.
“We’ve already seen delegations like this come here before,” he said. “We’ve seen this so-called ceasefire for three days, which ended after just a couple of hours, and now we’re supposed to naively think that two people will come and change something.”
In his Sunday prayer, Pope Leo XIV renewed his appeal for peace in Ukraine and said he hopes the negotiations will bring results.
“I hope that the efforts undertaken in recent days to resume negotiations will bear concrete fruit and make way for diplomacy,” he told the gathered faithful in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
___ Associated Press journalists Volodymyr Yurchuk and Yevhenii Ocheretianyi in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Elise Morton in London contributed to this report.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine