U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin for about two hours on Thursday, a day after they brokered two days of direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Abu Dhabi, NPR reported.
Those discussions in the United Arab Emirates capital were the first direct talks between representatives of Moscow and Kyiv in nine months, NPR said. The two days of talks that ended Wednesday produced an agreement to swap a large number of prisoners, with the exact figure still to be announced. After briefing Putin, the envoys were scheduled to fly to Dublin to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the BBC reported, as the war stretches toward the five-year mark.
NPR said the Abu Dhabi sessions produced no major breakthrough aside from the prisoner-exchange agreement. Kushner, speaking in Moscow, said the delegations "agreed on many of the principles, but are still apart on some of the way to accomplish" peace. Witkoff told Russian state TV after the Kremlin meeting that a new round of trilateral talks had already been agreed with Putin and that Europeans would join, the BBC reported. "They are our partners and it's important to us that they take part," Witkoff said.
The remaining gaps
Kushner said one goal in Moscow was to get Putin's blessing for European representatives to join talks that also involve the continent's broader security arrangements. NPR reported that the United States and Zelenskyy want Europe to appoint a single negotiator, but that Moscow does not want European countries in the direct negotiations, arguing they are financing and supplying Ukraine's military. Putin told the U.S. envoys that any European troops sent to Ukraine after a cease-fire would be "absolutely unacceptable" and that Russia would regard them as a security threat and legitimate targets. "In other words, the war would resume immediately," he said, according to NPR. He also said Russia regards a prospective peace border as extending to the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed in 2022 but never fully controlled.
Zelenskyy is in Dublin for a meeting of more than 40 European countries that includes NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. On Thursday, Zelenskyy also said Ukraine's military was again facing "systematic" restrictions on Starshield, SpaceX's military-grade satellite service, leaving Kyiv struggling to intercept Russian jet-powered drones, the BBC reported. He said the disruption had lasted several days and was "helping the Russians kill more Ukrainians." A similar outage in late October lasted about a week before it was fixed; it remained unclear who had ordered the restrictions, the BBC said. Neither outlet reported that a cease-fire had been reached.