Witkoff, Kushner Meet Zelensky in Kyiv After Moscow Talks as U.S. Renews Push to End Ukraine War
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, were in Kyiv on Sunday for talks with Ukrainian officials, a day after their lengthy meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The visit was the first for either man to the Ukrainian capital since the full-scale invasion began and amounted to the second leg of Washington’s latest diplomatic push to end the war.
Sunday’s discussions in Kyiv wrapped up after two rounds of U.S.-Ukraine talks and a third round that included European representatives. Earlier, a Ukrainian official said delegates from France, Britain and Germany had also traveled to Kyiv. Speaking after the first round, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “We want to prevent loss of life, we want this war to end fairly for all of us, and we want it to end in such a way that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is never repeated. I believe that every meeting like this will bring us closer to that goal.”
Zelensky’s press secretary, Serhiy Nykyforov, said the Ukrainian side had prepared T-shirts reading “Kyiv regime” as gifts for the attendees. Ahead of the meeting, Zelensky thanked Trump for allowing the trip to happen “from a security standpoint” and said Ukraine had been waiting a long time for Witkoff and Kushner to arrive.
During the visit, the U.S. delegation was shown damage at St. Sophia’s Cathedral, the UNESCO-listed landmark in central Kyiv whose windows and window frames have been damaged in Russian attacks. A Friday Russian strike on Ukraine’s Security Service headquarters in Kyiv also affected the cathedral.
Talks unfolded under a 72-hour pause in strikes on the two capitals, which took effect at midnight Saturday and was intended to last through the weekend. But the truce applied only to Kyiv and Moscow. Russia continued launching drones overnight into Sunday, with Ukraine’s Air Force reporting 108 Shahed-type drones fired from Russian territory. At least three people were killed in the latest attacks, and infrastructure in the wider Kyiv region was hit, Ukrainian officials said.
Russian airstrikes were recorded in 11 locations across Ukraine, and emergency crews extinguished a large fire at an infrastructure facility outside Kyiv. Over the previous 24 hours, Ukrainian officials said, 10 civilians were killed and 65 wounded.
Witkoff and Kushner began the weekend in Moscow on Saturday afternoon, meeting Putin at the Kremlin for three hours before staying for dinner. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov called the talks “useful,” saying the U.S. visitors had “prepared seriously for this trip.” He said they expressed interest in ending hostilities as quickly as possible and offered “a whole series of considerations regarding possible paths to a settlement.” A White House official said both sides discussed “substantive plans for next steps, which will be announced in the coming weeks.”
After leaving Moscow, the delegation made a stop in Rzeszow, Poland, a key transit hub for the region. Russian state media reported the plane landed at 1:31 a.m. local time, and the envoys most likely continued toward Kyiv by rail.
The Moscow-to-Kyiv sequence underlined the administration’s willingness to engage both capitals directly, while also showing Kyiv that American pressure for a ceasefire is rising. Zelensky has repeatedly warned that an acute shortage of air-defense interceptors has left Ukrainian cities exposed to ballistic-missile attacks. For Ukraine, the immediate question is whether this round of diplomacy produces concrete security commitments or remains a narrow, carefully managed pause in a war that is still exacting a heavy civilian toll.