US envoys hold ‘substantive’ talks with Zelenskyy in first visit to Kyiv 

United States special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have held talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on ending Russia’s war against his country, marking their first visit to Kyiv since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

The meeting on Sunday came a day after the two met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

“It is very important that the delegation has arrived to see us. We have been waiting a long time for Steve and Jared, Witkoff and Kushner,” Zelenskyy said, thanking US President Donald Trump for “allowing them to come” despite the war.

After the meeting, Witkoff said the US team had been “very encouraged” by what he described as a “substantive, important” discussion.

Earlier, Zelenskyy published a video of himself meeting Trump’s envoys in central Kyiv, saying, “Talks have begun.”

Ukraine’s top security officials and negotiators were also present, along with several European national security advisers. Zelenskyy said Europeans would participate in some of the talks with the US envoys.

“We are expecting one session of our talks, and then another session will be held with the European NSAs [national security advisers]. Several important sessions,” he said.

The US envoys arrived in the Ukrainian capital by train from Poland, hoping to revive negotiations to end Europe’s worst conflict since World War II after a summer of heightened tensions. While Witkoff and Kushner have visited Moscow eight times, they have never held talks in Kyiv until now.

Zelenskyy took the US envoys to see Kyiv’s historic Saint Sophia’s Cathedral, which sits opposite the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) security building that was hit by a Russian drone on Friday.

Moscow’s four-and-a-half-year invasion of Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

Previous rounds of US-mediated peace talks encouraged by Trump, who campaigned on a promise to quickly end the war, have yielded few results. He suggested on Friday that the US had a fresh proposal, though he did not elaborate.

‘Highly useful’ meeting

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov described Saturday’s meeting in Moscow, which ran more than three hours, as “highly useful”, while a White House official told the Reuters news agency that the next steps would be announced in the coming weeks.

Ushakov called the talks “extremely frank”, saying the US team “put forward a number of ideas on possible routes to a settlement”, though he gave no details.

In televised comments before those talks, Putin said Russia would ensure the safety of the envoys while in Kyiv. “We will do everything that depends on us to ensure the safety of the negotiation process and mediators such as yourselves,” Putin told Witkoff and Kushner.

Earlier on Saturday, Putin had thanked Trump for persisting in his efforts to end the war despite it being “not simple”.

Trump said again on Friday that his envoys were bringing a “proposal” to end the fighting. “We have an idea for peace,” he said, without elaborating.

US efforts have so far failed to bring about a breakthrough in the war, in part because of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Meanwhile, Russia has occupied large swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine, and Putin has insisted Moscow is intent on seizing the rest of the east.

In previous talks, the two sides have remained far apart on a range of key issues, including the future of Ukraine’s eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia has demanded Ukraine’s withdrawal from an entrenched belt of towns that it still controls there, but Kyiv has refused, reckoning it can still hold out for years.

For Ukraine, hard security guarantees from its European allies and the US are crucial to deter Russia from invading again.

No strikes on capitals

Both Russia and Ukraine have pledged not to strike each other’s capital for three days around the US team’s visit. Yet despite the ceasefire agreement for the two cities, fighting continued elsewhere.

The Ukraine Air Force said Russia had attacked overnight with 108 drones and missiles. It also said on Sunday that it had struck the Ryazan oil refinery, about 480km (298 miles) inside Russia, overnight, causing a fire.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defence Ministry said it had shot down 400 drones in the past 24 hours, according to the Interfax news agency.

It added that strikes were carried out during the day on Ukrainian infrastructure facilities used by the country’s armed forces, as well as drone storage sites.