US President Donald Trump is sending senior negotiators to meet Vladimir Putin to push for a deal to end Russia’s war with Ukraine. Special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow next week, with Jared Kushner also involved in the process.
Published On 26 Nov 202526 Nov 2025
Share
Laura Gozziand
Ottilie Mitchell
ReutersUkraine has said a “common understanding” has been reached with the US on a peace deal aimed at ending the war with Russia.
The proposal is based on a 28-point plan presented to Kyiv by the US last week, which American and Ukrainian officials worked on during weekend talks in Geneva.
In a post on social media, US President Donald Trump said the original plan “has been fine-tuned, with additional input from both sides”.
He added: “I have directed my Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to meet with President Putin in Moscow and, at the same time, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll will be meeting with the Ukrainians.”
President Zelensky’s chief of staff said he expects Driscoll to visit Kyiv this week.
The Kremlin previously said that Russia had not yet been consulted on the new draft deal, warning it may not accept amendments to last week’s plan.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that while Moscow had been in favour of the initial US framework, the situation would be “fundamentally different” if it had undergone substantial changes.
As of Tuesday morning the Kremlin had not received a copy of the new plan, Lavrov said, accusing Europe of undermining US peace efforts.
American officials did not publicly address Russia’s concerns, although US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Russian representatives held meetings on Monday and Tuesday in Abu Dhabi.
Some of the issues which Russia and Ukraine are still deeply at odds over have reportedly remained unaddressed so far, including security guarantees for Kyiv and control of several regions in Ukraine’s east where fighting is taking place.
Zelensky said on Tuesday that he was ready to meet Trump to discuss “sensitive points”, with his administration aiming for a meeting before the end of the month.
“I am counting on further active cooperation with the American side and with President (Donald) Trump. Much depends on America, because Russia pays the greatest attention to American strength,” he said.
A day earlier, Zelensky said the 28-point plan had been slimmed down, with some provisions removed.
The White House has not commented on the prospect of bilateral talks, but Trump wrote on social media that he looked forward to meeting with presidents Zelensky and Putin “soon, but ONLY when the deal to end this War is FINAL or, in its final stages”.
Despite the White House’s relative optimism, European leaders seemed doubtful that, after almost four years of war, peace could be within reach. France’s Emmanuel Macron said he saw “no Russian will for a ceasefire”, while Downing Street warned there was “a long way to go – a tough road ahead.”
On Tuesday, Macron and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer chaired a meeting of the so-called coalition of the willing, a loose grouping of Ukraine’s allies in Europe and beyond who have pledged continued defence support in the event a ceasefire, including tentative talks on a potential peacekeeping force.
During the call – which was also joined by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the leaders agreed to set up a task force with the US to “accelerate” work on the security guarantees that could be offered to Ukraine.
The issue of security guarantees is only one of the areas on which Moscow and Kyiv are at odds. On Monday, Zelensky said the “main problem” blocking peace was Putin’s demand for legal recognition of the territory Russia had seized.
Moscow has consistently demanded full Ukrainian withdrawal from the whole of the eastern Donbas, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russian forces also control the Crimean peninsula – which Russia annexed in 2014 – and large parts of two other regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
After weeks in which diplomacy appeared to have stalled, there has been a flurry of activity since the US-backed plan was leaked.
The original draft included Ukraine agreeing to cede areas it continues to control, pledging not to join Nato and significantly cutting the size of its armed forces – elements which seemed to reflect key Kremlin demands.
While Putin said the original draft could form the “basis” for a deal, Zelensky responded by saying Ukraine faced a choice between retaining the US as a partner and its “dignity”. European leaders pushed back on several elements.
On the eve of talks over the plan in Geneva on Sunday between American, European and Ukrainian officials, Rubio was forced to publicly insist it was “authored by the US” after a group of senators claimed he had told them it was effectively a Russian draft, not the White House’s position.
Since then, both the US and Ukraine have hailed progress on the draft, with Zelensky saying it represented “the right approach” after securing changes.
While Trump had originally pushed for Ukraine to accept the plan swiftly, the president told reporters on Tuesday that the original version “was just a map”, adding: “That was not a plan, it was a concept.”
Also on Tuesday, Bloomberg published a transcript of what it said was a call on 14 October between Trump’s diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy aide.
Asked about the transcript – in which Witkoff reportedly discussed how the Kremlin should approach Trump, and said Ukraine would have to give up land to secure a peace deal – Trump told reporters it represented a “very standard form of negotiations”. BBC News has not independently verified the reported leaked call.
Meanwhile, the fighting continues. Both Russia and Ukraine said strikes had been carried out on Tuesday night in Zaporizhzhia.
Ukraine’s regional head there, Ivan Federov, said at least seven people had been injured, while Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor, reported that Kyiv had hit energy grids in areas it controls, leaving up to 40,000 people without electricity.
Tens of thousands of soldiers and thousands of civilians have been killed or injured, and millions of people have fled their homes since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
Ukraine says it supports the “essence” of a United States plan to end its war with Russia, as US President Donald Trump said “progress” is being made on securing a deal and that he would dispatch his special envoy to Russia for talks with President Vladimir Putin.
Tuesday saw a flurry of diplomatic activity after US and Ukrainian negotiators met two days earlier in Geneva to discuss Trump’s initial peace plan, which had been seen in Ukraine as a Russian wish list calling on Kyiv to cede territory to Moscow, limit its military and give up on joining NATO.
list of 3 itemsend of list
The plan has since been modified, with the emerging proposal reportedly accomodating concerns of Ukraine and its European allies.
Speaking at a video conference of the so-called coalition of the willing – a group of 30 countries supporting Ukraine – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv was ready to “move forward” with the as-yet-unpublished “framework”, though he still needed to address “sensitive points”.
Earlier, a Ukrainian official had told the Reuters news agency that Kyiv supported “the framework’s essence”. Building on that sense of momentum, Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, who led negotiations in Geneva, told US news website Axios that the security guarantees Ukraine was seeking looked “very solid”.
Speaking at the White House, Trump conceded that resolving the Ukraine war was “not easy”, but added, “We’re getting close to a deal.”
“I thought that would be an easier [deal], but I think we’re making progress,” he said.
Taking to his Truth Social platform later on, he said that he would send envoy Steve Witkoff to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to iron out “a few” remaining differences over the deal.
He said he hoped to meet “soon” with Putin and Zelenskyy, “but ONLY when the deal to end this War is FINAL or, in its final stages”.
Russia, which had hammered Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with a deadly barrage of missiles the previous night, seemed unconvinced of progress.
Russia has not yet seen the modified plan, which remains unpublished, but Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov underlined that it should reflect the “spirit and letter” of an understanding reached between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at their Alaska summit earlier this year.
“If the spirit and letter of Anchorage is erased in terms of the key understandings we have established, then, of course, it will be a fundamentally different situation [for Russia],” Lavrov warned.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova said there was a lot of “uncertainty” at the Kremlin, though there had allegedly been “behind-the-scenes interactions” between Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev and US counterpart Steve Witkoff, “who reportedly worked on the initial stage” of Trump’s plan.
The Russian side, she said, was not happy about revisions to the peace plan.
“Unlike the initial American plan presented by Donald Trump, which consisted of 28 points, the so-called European version doesn’t include withdrawing the Ukrainian armed forces from Donbas, it allows Kyiv to join NATO, and it doesn’t limit the size of its armed forces,” Shapovalova said.
Still, US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had earlier emerged upbeat from meeting with Russian officials in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, with his spokesman saying: “The talks are going well and we remain optimistic.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that there were “a few delicate, but not insurmountable, details that must be sorted out and will require further talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States”.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett said it was “unclear when those talks will happen, who will be involved, and what they will look like”. But, she added, it was clear they would not be imminent, given the upcoming American Thanksgiving holiday on November 27.
As the US strained to bridge the gap between Ukraine and Russia, leaders in the coalition of the willing, who have pledged to underwrite and guarantee any ceasefire, moved fast on security guarantees and a reconstruction plan for Ukraine.
In the video meeting, co-chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with Zelenskyy and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in attendance, the leaders decided to set up a task force between the US and coalition countries to “solidify” security guarantees.
Trump has not committed to providing back-up for a post-ceasefire “reassurance force” for Ukraine. The plan for the force involves European allies training Ukrainian troops and providing sea and air support, but would be reliant on US military muscle to work.
Speaking after the video call, Macron said discussions in Geneva had shown that there should be no limitations to the Ukrainian army, contrary to what had been outlined in the initial draft of the US plan.
He also said a decision on using frozen Russian assets for Ukraine’s reconstruction, at the heart of a political and legal impasse in a Europe seeking funding for Ukraine, would be “finalised in the coming days” with the European Commission.
Western countries froze approximately $300bn in Russian assets in 2022, mostly in Belgium, but there has been no consensus on how to proceed. Some support seizing the assets, while others, like Belgium, remain cautious owing to legal concerns.
According to reports, Trump’s plan would split the assets between reconstruction and US-Russia investments.
Macron hit out at Russia, saying “continued pressure” should be put on Moscow to negotiate. “On the ground, the reality is quite the opposite of a willingness for peace,” he said, alluding to Russia’s overnight attacks on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, which left seven dead and disrupted power and heating systems.
In his daily evening address, Zelenskyy said: “What is especially cynical is that Russia carried out such strikes while talks are under way on how to end the war”.
Al-Sharaa’s trip, planned for November 10, will be first-ever visit by a Syrian president to the White House.
United States President Donald Trump will host Syria’s interim leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, for talks on November 10, according to Washington’s envoy to Damascus, in what would mark the first-ever visit by a Syrian president to the US capital.
Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Syria, told the Axios newspaper on Saturday that al-Sharaa is expected to sign an agreement to join an international US-led alliance against the ISIL (ISIS) group during his visit.
list of 4 itemsend of list
The Reuters news agency also cited a Syrian source familiar with the matter as saying that the trip was expected to take place within the next two weeks.
According to the US State Department’s historical list of foreign leader visits, no previous Syrian president has paid an official visit to Washington.
Al-Sharaa, who seized power from Bashar al-Assad last December, has been seeking to re-establish Syria’s ties with world powers that had shunned Damascus during al-Assad’s rule.
He met with Trump in Saudi Arabia in May, in what was the first encounter between the two nations’ leaders in 25 years.
The meeting, on the sidelines of Trump’s get-together with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, was seen as a major turn of events for a Syria that is still adjusting to life after the more than 50-year rule of the Assad family.
Al-Sharaa also addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September.
Barrack, the US envoy to Syria, told reporters on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain that Washington was aiming to recruit Damascus to join the coalition the US has led since 2014 to fight against ISIL, the armed group that controlled about a third of Syria and Iraq at its peak, between 2014 and 2017.
“We are trying to get everybody to be a partner in this alliance, which is huge for them,” Barrack said.
Al-Sharaa once led Syria’s offshoot of al-Qaeda, but a decade ago, his anti-Assad rebel group broke away from the network founded by Osama bin Laden, and later clashed with ISIL.
Al-Sharaa once had a $10m US reward on his head.
Al-Sharaa, also referred to as Abu Mohammed al-Julani, had joined fighters battling US forces in Iraq before entering the Syrian war. He was even imprisoned by US troops there for several years.
The US-led coalition and its local partners drove ISIL from its last stronghold in Syria in 2019.
Al-Sharaa’s planned visit to Washington comes as Trump is urging Middle East allies to seize the moment to build a durable peace in the volatile region after Israel and Hamas earlier this month began implementing a ceasefire and captives’ deal. That agreement aims to bring about a permanent end to Israel’s brutal two-year war in Gaza.
The fragile ceasefire and captive release deal continues to hold, but the situation remains precarious.
Israeli strikes in Gaza earlier this week killed 104 people, including dozens of women and children, the enclave’s health authorities said. The strikes, the deadliest since the ceasefire began on October 10, marked the most serious challenge to the tenuous truce to date.
Meanwhile, Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli air strikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.
Barrack told the Manama Dialogue earlier that Syria and Israel continued to hold de-escalation talks, which the US has been mediating.
He told reporters that Syria and Israel were close to reaching an agreement, but declined to say when exactly a deal could be reached.
Israel and Syria have been Middle East adversaries for decades.
Despite the overthrow of al-Assad last December, territorial disputes and deep-seated political mistrust between the two countries remain.