KYIV, Ukraine\u00a0\u2014\u00a0U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held \u201cencouraging\u201d talks in Kyiv on Sunday in their first official visit to Ukraine, but made no breakthrough toward ending Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration\u2019s push to end the war has lost momentum, with the focus on the Iran war for the last six months.<\/p>\n
The trip by the Americans, part of a renewed effort to end the conflict, followed a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, as both sides have escalated their aerial attacks in a war that has continued for more than 4\u00bd years.<\/p>\n
Despite the latest diplomatic push, the core demands of Moscow and Kyiv remain mutually exclusive, especially over territorial concessions, underscoring the difficulty of reaching an agreement. Kushner acknowledged the challenge, saying the U.S. was working \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d to create the conditions for a possible deal.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very, very hard problem, but we\u2019re going to try,\u201d Kushner said.<\/p>\n
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 1,775-mile front line.<\/p>\n
Zelensky held three rounds of talks with the Americans on Sunday, the last of which brought in national security advisors from the United Kingdom, France and Germany.<\/p>\n
Security guarantees and a winter plan<\/p>\n
Zelensky said at a news conference that the discussions covered air defense needs \u2014 including Patriot systems \u2014 and a \u201cwinter package\u201d of support covering both air defense and energy infrastructure before the colder months. He said that Kyiv was seeking \u201cserious volumes\u201d of American support on that front, with backing from European partners as well.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian president said the U.S. planned to increase production of Patriot interceptor missiles next year, with Germany also expanding its own production under existing licensing agreements.<\/p>\n
Zelensky said that Russia had intensified strikes on Ukrainian cities before Russia\u2019s State Duma elections this month, calling the attacks deliberate \u201cterror\u201d against civilians. He said Ukraine was working with 67 domestic companies developing systems to shoot down Russia\u2019s jet-powered drones at scale.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian leader said the territorial question \u201cremains relevant,\u201d but reiterated his view that such difficult issues \u201ccan only be resolved at the level of leaders.\u201d Zelensky said the talks also touched on long-term security guarantees and economic support for Ukraine\u2019s postwar reconstruction. He said that a strong Ukrainian army remained \u201cone of the main guarantees of security.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zelensky said the sides agreed to hold a follow-up meeting involving Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe, though a location has not been set.<\/p>\n
Witkoff said the U.S. was pursuing \u201ca diplomatic resolution to this conflict, not a kinetic resolution.\u201d Referring to the previous day\u2019s talks, he said the meeting in Moscow had produced \u201cnew ideas\u201d that were brought to Kyiv. He pointed to the presence of national security advisors from the so-called E3 nations \u2014 France, Germany and Britain \u2014 as evidence that \u201ccollaboration is critical\u201d to reaching a deal.<\/p>\n
Asked whether Washington was prepared to increase pressure on Russia if the talks produced no breakthrough, Kushner said the U.S. approach was to look for a \u201cwin-win\u201d outcome.<\/p>\n
He said his father-in-law, President Trump, was focused not just on ending the fighting but on building \u201ca framework that could actually lead to a durable peace.\u201d He added that he and Witkoff had held a \u201cconstructive and substantive\u201d meeting with Putin, discussing what Russia, Ukraine and the wider world could each gain from a settlement.<\/p>\n
Kushner said the two envoys hoped to revive trilateral talks involving Russia and Ukraine directly, a format last used roughly six months earlier, and said that Washington remained in near-daily contact with Ukrainian officials between visits.<\/p>\n
No breakthroughs in Moscow talks<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s meeting in Moscow lasted more than three hours behind closed doors and ended without any major developments being announced. Putin\u2019s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, described the talks as constructive, frank and useful, but he didn\u2019t discuss specific outcomes.<\/p>\n
While Moscow offered its \u201ccomprehensive assessment\u201d of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, Ushakov said, the talks weren\u2019t purely focused on the war.<\/p>\n
\u201cEconomic issues and potentially large, mutually beneficial joint projects for Russia and America were discussed in considerable detail,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The last known visit to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner was in January when they also held talks with Putin at the Kremlin.<\/p>\n
Russia and Ukraine continue to exchange fire<\/p>\n
Putin and Zelensky had agreed to pause strikes on each other\u2019s capitals while the talks took place. Still, the two sides traded fire overnight into Sunday, officials said.<\/p>\n
Air raids on the capital noticeably eased during the U.S. envoys\u2019 visit, prompting Zelensky to joke that their presence in Kyiv appeared more potent than the Patriot missile systems Ukraine has been urgently seeking.<\/p>\n
Russian attacks across multiple Ukrainian regions killed one person and wounded at least 10 others overnight into Sunday, Ukraine\u2019s State Emergency Service said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s air force said Sunday it intercepted 82 drones out of 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.<\/p>\n
The Russian Defense Ministry said Sunday its air defenses overnight shot down 258 Ukrainian drones over 14 Russian regions, the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula and the waters of the Black and Azov Seas.<\/p>\n
Mixed hopes on the ground<\/p>\n
In Kyiv on Sunday, dozens gathered for a nationwide 9 a.m. moment of silence honoring Ukraine\u2019s fallen soldiers, a daily ritual held in cities across the country.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d Lipei told the Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Not everyone shared her optimism. Oleksandr Pastukhov, a 27-year-old video editor who joined the commemoration, was skeptical the envoys\u2019 visit would change anything.<\/p>\n
In his Sunday prayer, Pope Leo XIV renewed his appeal for peace in Ukraine and said he hopes the negotiations will bring results.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that the efforts undertaken in recent days to resume negotiations will bear concrete fruit and make way for diplomacy,\u201d he told the gathered faithful in St. Peter\u2019s Square at the Vatican.<\/p>\n
Kullab writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Volodymyr Yurchuk and Yevhenii Ocheretianyi in Kyiv and Elise Morton in London contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KYIV, Ukraine\u00a0\u2014\u00a0U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held \u201cencouraging\u201d talks in Kyiv on Sunday in their first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[856,185,158,1038,3761,38,414,25,113,6342,3329,26,2713,8856,170],"class_list":["post-38303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-air-defense-need","tag-kushner","tag-kyiv","tag-meeting","tag-month","tag-moscow","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-sunday","tag-talk","tag-u-s","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian-city","tag-visit","tag-zelensky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}