Trump Envoys in Kyiv After Moscow Talks End Without Deal — SkimNews
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- Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Kyiv on Sunday for their first official visit to Ukraine — more than 4½ years after Russia's full-scale invasion — as part of a renewed U.S. push for peace, welcomed at the train station by high-ranking Ukrainian officials and met by Zelensky at St. Sophia Square.
- Zelensky said his government is ready for a "constructive" discussion with the U.S. emissaries, posting on Telegram that "peace is needed, security guarantees are needed, a just and sustainable postwar peace is needed" and that "our proposals are prepared."
- The Moscow meeting lasted more than three hours behind closed doors and ended without major developments; Putin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov called it "constructive, frank and useful" but emphasized that "economic issues and potentially large, mutually beneficial joint projects for Russia and America were discussed in considerable detail."
- Russia and Ukraine continued trading fire overnight into Sunday despite Putin and Zelensky having agreed to pause strikes on each other's capitals during the talks — Ukraine intercepted 82 of 108 Russian drones along with six missiles, while Russia said its air defences shot down 258 Ukrainian drones across 14 regions, Crimea, and the Black and Azov Seas.
- Russian attacks across multiple Ukrainian regions killed one person and wounded at least 10 overnight, including a 74-year-old man killed in Zaporizhzhia and seven wounded when a drone damaged an apartment building in the Khmelnytskyi region.
- Kyiv residents showed split reactions at a daily 9 a.m. moment of silence honoring fallen soldiers: 67-year-old Nataliia Lipei, whose son Viktor was killed in December 2022, expressed hope that "these steps and these meetings will definitely produce results," while 27-year-old video editor Oleksandr Pastukhov was skeptical, saying "we've seen this so-called ceasefire for three days, which ended after just a couple of hours."
Why it matters: The Moscow talks' pivot toward "potentially large, mutually beneficial joint projects" alongside an unannounced battlefield breakthrough suggests the Trump team is exploring transactional economic leverage rather than a ceasefire framework — a framing that Kyiv skeptics like Oleksandr Pastukhov publicly doubt will produce what previous delegations didn't.
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