Witkoff and Kushner Leave Kyiv Pushing Trilateral Talks; Zelensky Says Territory Is a Leaders-Level Question

KYIV — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent Sunday in the Ukrainian capital carrying what they described as ideas heard the day before in the Kremlin, then stood with President Volodymyr Zelensky and said the next step should be a return to three-way talks with Moscow.

It was the pair’s first official wartime visit to Kyiv. It produced no announced ceasefire, no published peace paper, and no public movement by Ukraine off its position on the east. What it did produce was a public record of three negotiating rounds, a European sit-in on the last hour, and a set of quotes both sides can take home.

Three rounds, then a press conference

Zelensky said the Americans arrived with the blessing of President Donald Trump and that the day ran in three sessions. The first two were bilateral. National security advisers representing the United Kingdom, France, and Germany — identified by Zelensky as Jonathan, Emmanuel, and Günter — joined the third.

Talks began at the St. Sophia complex in central Kyiv and later moved to Mariinsky Palace. The envoys came in by train. Opening the joint press conference, Zelensky thanked them and joked that they had “worked even better than the Patriot systems” for people in the capital that day — then walked the line back to substance.

“While we can sometimes joke about Patriot, we nevertheless understand that this is a very pressing issue and a very important one for us,” he said in the official English text posted by the Presidential Office.

He called all three rounds “very substantive.” Witkoff said the U.S. team had come “to resume the negotiation process” and was focused on “a diplomatic resolution to this conflict, not a kinetic resolution.”

What the Americans said they heard in Moscow

Saturday’s Kremlin session lasted three hours and 10 minutes and ran into dinner. In Kyiv, Witkoff put more of that trip on the record. “We think we made a lot of progress in Moscow. We heard new ideas,” he told reporters. He said the U.S. side met Putin first because “we needed to hear where he stood,” then briefed Zelensky’s team. He hoped a new round of U.S.-mediated talks would be announced “in short order.”

Kushner said Trump had tasked the pair with preparing a “peace package” aimed at “a framework that will actually build a durable peace,” and argued for returning to the trilateral format used about six months earlier — talks that previously ran in Abu Dhabi and Geneva before freezing as Washington’s focus shifted to Iran.

Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon asked Witkoff whether Putin had been deceiving him. Witkoff said the U.S. team had “always received respect from President Putin” and that without working channels to both capitals the odds of a settlement would be small.

Zelensky’s line on territory

The official presidential statement did not use the word Donbas. It did put the map on the table.

“The territorial issue remains a relevant one, in my view,” Zelensky said. “I still hold the view that such complex issues can only be resolved at the level of leaders.”

In the Q&A, he went further. The Irish Times quoted him: “The question of Donbas isn’t just about Donbas. It is, between us, the question of the entire war.” Other outlets covering the same session reported that he rejected handing Moscow the eastern industrial region, about three-quarters of which Russian forces already hold.

Putin, on Saturday, offered no walk-back of what he calls the “root causes” of the war. The three-day pause he ordered covers strikes on Kyiv, not the rest of the front.

The winter package

If there was a deliverable Kyiv was willing to name, it was supply, not a map. Zelensky said “if the war continues into the winter — and for now, that is how things look — we are counting heavily on the winter package”: air defense, energy infrastructure, and “substantial volumes of American LNG.” He said the United States planned to increase Patriot interceptor production next year. Ukraine, Europe, and the United States agreed to meet again soon. No site was set.

No text of Trump’s proposal was released in either capital. No date was set for the trilateral session the envoys want.