Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will brief Kyiv officials in Miami on Thursday, after a US meeting with Vladimir Putin this week concluded with no agreement on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Witkoff and Kushner will meet Ukraine’s chief negotiator Rustem Umerov and chief of the general staff Andriy Hnatov to continue talks, after the Russian president rejected a US-backed peace proposal and renewed threats to seize more Ukrainian territory.
A senior Ukrainian official cautioned that Thursday’s meeting was a “debrief by the Americans” and not “a negotiation session . . . when they are back [in Kyiv] we will have a delegation meeting and see what’s next”.
The talks in Miami come after Kremlin officials said there had been “no compromise” on a proposal presented by the US side during five hours of talks with Putin on Tuesday.
Putin has so far rejected all peace proposals and stuck to maximalist demands that leaders in Kyiv and Europe warned would amount to Ukraine’s capitulation.
He has escalated his attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure as Russian forces advance in the east. Ukraine’s energy ministry reported on Thursday that tens of thousands of residents in Odesa, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions were without power due to Russian attacks on the energy grid.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that talks were proceeding ‘‘quite effectively’’, including at recent meetings in Geneva and Florida.
‘‘Ukraine was heard, and Ukraine was listened to,” he said. ‘‘A dignified peace is only possible if Ukraine’s interests are taken into account.”
Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump said: “I don’t know what the Kremlin’s doing. I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin.” He said that it was his envoys’ impression that Russia would like to end the war.
“You know, Ukraine, I think we have something pretty well worked out with them,” Trump said. However, he said he felt Zelenskyy should have cut a deal in February, when the US and Ukrainian presidents’ meeting in the Oval Office devolved into a shouting match.
“I thought that would have been a much better time to settle,” Trump told reporters. “But they in their wisdom decided not to do that. They have a lot of things against them right now.”
Putin, visiting India on Thursday, dismissed much of the latest Ukraine peace plan presented by the US envoys, Tass cited him as saying in an interview with India Today. He said the talks in Moscow lasted so long because it was necessary to go through all the points of the proposal.
A new 28-point peace plan drawn up by the US with Russian officials last month was condemned by Kyiv and European officials as pro-Kremlin, and was subsequently pared back to 19 points in talks between the US and Ukraine.
Some terms, the Russian president said, he could agree to, while others “we can’t agree to”, according to Tass.
But signalling little intention of agreeing to a deal soon, Putin warned that Russia would seize more Ukrainian territory by any means.
“It all comes down to this. Either we liberate these territories by force of arms. Or Ukrainian troops leave these territories and stop fighting there,” Putin said.
Russian forces have intensified ground assaults on the battlefield of south-eastern Donetsk province and are threatening Ukraine’s grip on the stronghold of Pokrovsk and neighbouring Myrnohrad.
Myroslav Kryvoruchko, a press officer for the 38th marine brigade fighting in the area, said on Thursday that Russian troops had superior forces there focused on “encircling and subsequently capturing Myrnohrad, as well as gradually destroying the units located in the city”.
He said that his units were slowing down the Russian advance and inflicting significant losses, but that the Kremlin’s forces were complicating Ukraine’s logistics.
A spokesperson for Ukraine 7th Corps of the Air Assault Forces said Russian forces had become bogged down in urban combat for Pokrovsk and were unable to capture the city by force.
“As a result, Russian forces are intensifying propaganda and disinformation efforts, spreading fabricated claims about the alleged ‘capture of Pokrovsk’ — both openly and covertly,” the spokesperson said.
Putin said the US side had split the 28-point peace plan into four packets, offering to discuss each packet individually.
A Ukrainian official familiar with the US proposal in Moscow said: “They have things we refused to discuss . . . things we did not endorse that they want to discuss with the Russians.”
Ukraine has strongly opposed Russia’s demands that it give up its aspirations to join Nato, significantly reduce the size of its military and relinquish the remainder of the Donetsk province that remains under Kyiv’s control.
That portion of the province has served as a bulwark against Russian forces for 11 years — since the Kremlin’s first, covert invasion under the guise of a pro-Russian separatist rebellion in 2014.
Moscow’s insistence that Ukraine gives up the remaining one-fifth of Donetsk province that its forces hold is one of the biggest sticking points between Russia and Ukraine, with the war now in its fourth year.
The senior Ukrainian official said that the Russians’ “intention is to keep dragging it out with the US, to just have ongoing discussions”.
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