Steve Witkoff, the US administration’s peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on 5 September.
They then travelled to Kyiv on 6 September for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
After that meeting, Zelensky said Ukraine was prepared to return to negotiations involving Ukraine, the United States and Russia, with the aim of ending the war. He also said the sides had agreed to a separate follow-up meeting bringing together representatives of Ukraine, the US and European countries.
On 9 September, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the discussions held by Witkoff and Kushner in Kyiv and Moscow as substantive.
Kyrylo Budanov, the Presidential Office head and leader of the Ukrainian delegation at earlier talks, offered the clearest indication of the proposed timetable on 12 September. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv, organised by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, he said trilateral negotiations involving Ukraine, the US and Russia were being prepared for October. ‘We are preparing. For October.’
Budanov confirmed that the preparations concerned a trilateral format and declined to discuss a possible venue. He had told The New York Times that negotiations mediated by the Trump administration were expected to begin by late September. The expected talks are scheduled for days after Russia’s parliamentary election and weeks before US midterm elections.
The diplomatic tour came more than six months after the last US-brokered negotiations stalled in February. Since then, Russian and Ukrainian airstrikes have escalated in a deadly campaign.
The effort returns the US to a familiar diplomatic problem. For eight years from 2014 to 2022, the Minsk Peace Process was the main framework for attempts to end the war in eastern Ukraine. It included the Minsk I agreement of September 2014 and the Minsk II agreements of February 2015.
On 11 February 2015, Putin, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held peace talks at the Palace of Independence in Minsk. Ceasefires agreed through the Minsk process repeatedly failed to hold. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked its definitive failure.
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