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White House envoy Steve Witkoff is in Moscow is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday after a whirlwind weekend of negotiations with Ukraine aimed at securing a peace deal.
All eyes are on Putin as Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and occasional foreign policy envoy, feel out whether Putin might agree to the 19-point proposal they finalized with Ukrainian counterparts following initial U.S.-Russian talks.
The latest round of diplomacy represents the most active push toward a potential settlement since the full-scale invasion in 2022, but negotiators acknowledge that significant obstacles remain. Core disputes over territory, Ukraine’s long-term security arrangements, and the conditions for any ceasefire are unresolved, and officials say progress will depend on whether Putin shows flexibility during this week’s meetings.
After an initial 28-point plan brokered by Witkoff and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev was viewed by Kyiv as too favorable to Moscow, U.S. and Ukrainian officials went back to the drawing board. They met in Geneva at the end of November to work through a trimmed-down version of the plan and again over the weekend in Florida to hammer out additional details.
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Both sides said the talks were productive but offered no specifics on which issues still divide them.
“So much work remains,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after the meeting. “But today was again a very productive and useful session where I think additional progress was made.”
“There’s a good chance we can make a deal,” Trump said.
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Despite the momentum, the two sides remain far apart. Several of the most sensitive issues were left for a meeting between principal leaders.
Russia insists Ukraine cannot join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — even though Ukraine amended its constitution to make NATO membership a national objective. In the original 28-point plan, Russia also demanded Ukraine reduce its peacetime armed forces to 600,000.
European and Ukrainian officials instead floated an 800,000 cap, according to the Financial Times. Ukraine currently fields around 880,000 troops, up from about 209,000 before the 2022 invasion.
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The largest impasse remains territorial concessions. A draft of the earlier proposal suggested recognizing Crimea and large parts of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as de facto Russian.
Complicating the process is the sudden removal of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, who resigned after a corruption probe led to a raid of his home. Yermak had publicly insisted days earlier that Ukraine would not give up land for peace.
“Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” he told The Atlantic magazine.
Putin said at the end of November he was ready for “serious” talks but also asserted that Russia has the upper hand and would halt fighting only if Ukrainian forces withdraw from territory it has recaptured on the front lines.
“If they don’t withdraw, we will achieve this by force,” he said.
Analysts say Washington still has levers it could use if negotiations stall, including tightening sanctions and expanding military assistance to Ukraine. But many of the most powerful economic measures — such as penalties on major Russian energy and financial entities — are already in place, and the U.S. has provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military aid since 2022.
That leaves a narrower set of options if the talks reach an impasse.
Trump has voiced frustration with the slow pace of diplomacy in recent days, saying publicly that he believed a resolution “should have happened a long time ago,” though officials have not indicated that Washington is preparing to walk away from the talks.
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