President Trump’s envoys achieved one thing with their first trip to Ukraine’s capital on Sunday as they tried to jump-start peace talks between Russia and Ukraine: a brief pause in Russia’s deadly bombing campaign against Kyiv.
Ukraine and Russia held off on strikes on each other’s capitals as the U.S. envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, visited first Moscow then Kyiv this weekend.
“Come visit more often, and we’ll have a chance to let our people live a little,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday after talks with the pair. Russia has been carrying out regular strikes on Kyiv in recent weeks using jet-powered drones that Ukraine is struggling to counter.
On Saturday, after Kushner and Witkoff met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a White House official said the men discussed substantive plans for next steps to resolve the conflict. The official declined to provide details but said those plans would be announced “in the coming weeks.”
As had been expected, Sunday’s talks didn’t produce a breakthrough. Zelensky thanked them for restarting efforts to mediate an end to the war. He said they also discussed a potential winter aid package, including air defense, energy support and American liquefied natural gas.
To reach Kyiv, Kushner and Witkoff took an overnight train from Poland. When they arrived, they were taken to Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral, a few hundred yards from the headquarters of Ukraine’s security service, which Russia struck with an explosive drone on Friday. Zelensky greeted both men with an embrace.
Witkoff, who lavished praise on Putin on Saturday, praised Ukraine and Zelensky. “Their resiliency is so pronounced; it’s special. You’ve been brave and we commend you,” he said.
Kushner thanked Ukraine for its hospitality and said that Trump was working hard to end the war. He gave little indication that anything substantive had changed but said it had been good to restart discussions and that he hoped trilateral talks could begin again.
“It was a very good dialogue,” he said of the meeting Saturday with Putin. “We asked a lot of questions. He asked a lot of questions.”
Unlike traditional U.S. diplomacy undertaken by career diplomats, Trump’s peace process has pushed Witkoff, his friend and a billionaire real-estate developer, and Kushner, his son-in-law, to the center of talks about how to end the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II.
The White House official said the pair were joined in the discussions by U.S. officials from the National Security Council, State Department and Treasury Department.
The visit comes just over a week after Central Intelligence Agency chief John Ratcliffe spent several hours in Moscow for talks with his Russian counterpart. According to people briefed on that discussion, Ratcliffe discouraged Russian escalation, warned about the growing difficulties Moscow is encountering on the front line and pushed for a restart to the long-stalled peace process.
Both Russia and Ukraine appeared to have laid out their longstanding positions: Russia’s that Ukraine hand over its eastern Donbas region and, ultimately, submit to Russian control, and Ukraine’s that it won’t give up territory and needs security guarantees.
The dynamic on the battlefield has changed drastically in the past few months. Russia’s summer offensive, aimed at taking all of Donbas, failed. Instead, Russia gained only small patches of territory at a cost of around 1,000 casualties a day, according to Ukrainian officials and military analysts.
But Russia thinks it holds an advantage for the winter, when analysts expect Russia to find a way to bring hundreds of thousands more men to the battlefield and seek to cut heat and electricity in cities across Ukraine by bombing energy infrastructure.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com