Witkoff and Kushner Met Zelenskyy in Kyiv a Day After Sitting With Putin

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent Sunday in Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one day after the two American envoys sat across from Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. They left without announcing a ceasefire, a framework or a date for anything, and with the same two words they had used in Moscow the day before: substantive, and encouraging.

"We are very encouraged," Witkoff said after the meeting, describing the discussions as substantive and important. Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, said Trump remains "very determined to see an end to this war." Neither man would say what is actually in the proposal they are carrying between the two capitals, and neither would put a timeline on it.

The trip was bracketed by an unusual arrangement. Russia and Ukraine agreed to hold off on aerial attacks against each other's capitals while the envoys were traveling, which gave Moscow and Kyiv a few quiet nights. It was not a ceasefire. It covered two cities, not a front line that runs for roughly a thousand kilometers, and Ukrainian officials reported strikes elsewhere in the country during the same window. Zelenskyy said Ukraine's own proposals are ready and that his government has "always been and will remain constructive," a line he has now used through three American administrations' worth of negotiating rounds.

For the Ukrainians, the substance of the meeting was less about the diplomacy than about the winter. Ukraine is entering its fifth cold season of the war critically short of American-made air-defense interceptors, the Patriot and NASAMS rounds that keep Russian ballistic missiles off power plants and substations. Deliveries this year have run far below last year's, and Ukrainian air-defense crews have gone through nights where they intercepted almost nothing that was fired at them. Zelenskyy has spent months arguing that no political settlement is worth much if the grid is dark by January, and he pressed the envoys on immediate energy and air-defense needs alongside the longer question of security guarantees.

That question — what Ukraine gets in writing, from whom, and enforced how — remains the hardest part of any deal and the part neither envoy addressed publicly. Kyiv wants commitments that survive a change of government in Washington. Moscow has spent the war insisting that Western security guarantees to Ukraine are the problem rather than the solution.

Witkoff has now made the Moscow trip repeatedly, including a meeting with Putin in January. Sunday was the first time he and Kushner had gone on to Kyiv in the same swing, and American officials have been pushing to get Russians and Ukrainians into the same room with the United States rather than continuing the shuttle. Witkoff said he was confident there would be a good resolution. He did not say when.