Steve Witkoff’s aircraft on the ground at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport on Tuesday morning ahead of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/EPA
Dec. 2 (UPI) — Russian President Vladimir Putin was due to hold talks on Ukraine on Tuesday with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, amid a renewed push by the White House to end the war.
Witkoff brought with him a revised version of a 28-point peace plan first floated by Trump in the middle of November, seen as being strongly weighted in Moscow’s favor. The new plan was drawn up by U.S. officials in consultation with Ukraine and European diplomats.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said Tuesday’s summit, due to get underway at around 5 p.m. local time, would be for “as long as necessary,” but with mounting progress on the frontline of the war in recent days, Moscow has been openly signaling it believes it will succeed with or without a deal.
The Kremlin visit, Witkoff’s sixth in 10 months, came after U.S.-Ukrainian negotiations over the weekend in Miami ended inconclusively, with the parties saying they had gone well but that more work was needed to resolve outstanding issues.
Encouraged by Russian forces’ progress on the battlefield, including claims Monday to have taken the key Ukrainian cities of Pokrovsk in Donetsk and Vovchansk in Kharkiv after year-long sieges, Putin has made it clear he is not prepared to soften his demands and Trump and his team will need to apply more pressure on Ukraine.
Putin has also capitalized on a corruption scandal embroiling Ukrainian officials, some very close to President Volodymyr Zelensky, including his lead negotiator, Andriy Yermak, who was forced to resign Friday.
Russia’s maximalist demands require Ukraine to hand over territory in the Donbas that it still holds, the removal of any path to NATO membership and shrinking the size of its military, as well as succumbing permanently to Russia’s sphere of influence in disputed areas by adopting its language, culture and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Experts set low expectations for the Witkoff-Kushner mission.
“The main expectations likely boil down to maintaining a high-level communication channel during this crisis period. This in itself considered important for avoiding dangerous escalation,” said political analyst Ilya Grashchenkov.
As recently as last week, Putin responded to the latest initiative by telling reporters that the war would end when Ukrainian troops pulled out of the territories they occupied, threatening that if they did not do so, Russia would remove them by force.
On a heavily publicized visit to the frontline on Sunday, Putin again showed little sign he was about to embark on peace talks, attacking the “criminal policies” of Zelensky’s administration, which he said was a “thieving junta” that had seized power illegitimately.
However, while Grashchenkov said that Russia’s mounting economic woes might force Putin’s hand further down the line, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center senior analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said Putin was banking on Ukraine losing Western support for continuing the war, the more territory it lost.