By SAMYA KULLAB Associated Press
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held “encouraging” talks in Kyiv on Sunday in their first official visit to Ukraine as part of a renewed effort to end Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The Trump administration’s push to end the fighting has lost momentum, with the focus on the Iran war for the past six months.
The trip by the Americans follows a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, as both sides have escalated their aerial attacks in the more than 4½-year all-out war.
Russia has recently been using fast-flying jet-powered drones, and the recurring wail of air-raid sirens has become part of daily life in Kyiv. Troops have struggled to make progress along the 1,250-kilometer (775-mile) front line.
Zelenskyy held three rounds of talks with the Americans on Sunday, the last of which brought in national security advisers from the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Security guarantees and a winter plan
Zelenskyy said at a news conference that the discussions covered air defense needs — including Patriot systems — and a “winter package” of support covering both air defense and energy infrastructure before the colder months. He said that Kyiv was seeking “serious volumes” of American support on that front, with backing from European partners as well.
The Ukrainian president said that the U.S. planned to increase production of Patriot interceptor missiles next year, with Germany also expanding its own production under existing licensing agreements.
Zelenskyy said that Russia had intensified strikes on Ukrainian cities before Russia’s State Duma election later this month, calling the attacks deliberate “terror” against civilians, and said that Ukraine was working with 67 domestic companies developing systems to shoot down Russia’s jet-powered drones at scale.
The Ukrainian leader said the territorial question “remains relevant,” but reiterated his view that such difficult issues “can only be resolved at the level of leaders.” Zelenskyy said that the talks also touched on long-term security guarantees and economic support for Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. He said that a strong Ukrainian army remained “one of the main guarantees of security.”
Zelenskyy said that the sides had agreed to hold a follow-up meeting involving Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe, though a location has not been set.
Witkoff said that the U.S. was pursuing “a diplomatic resolution to this conflict, not a kinetic resolution.” Referring to the previous day’s talks, he said that the meeting in Moscow had produced “new ideas” that were later brought to Kyiv, and pointed to the presence of national security advisers from the so-called E3 nations — France, Germany and the U.K. — as evidence that “collaboration is critical” to reaching a deal.
Both sides would need to make compromises, Witkoff said, adding: “We think we have the ingredients to get to that place.”
Asked whether Washington was prepared to increase pressure on Russia if the talks produced no breakthrough, Kushner said that the U.S. approach was to look for a “win-win” outcome.
He said that his father-in-law, U.S. President Donald Trump, was focused not just on ending the fighting but on building “a framework that could actually lead to a durable peace,” and that he and Witkoff had held a “constructive and substantive” meeting with Putin a day earlier, discussing what Russia, Ukraine and the wider world could each gain from a settlement.
Kushner said that the two envoys hoped to revive trilateral talks involving Russia and Ukraine directly, a format last used roughly six months earlier, and said that Washington remained in near-daily contact with Ukrainian officials even between visits.
No breakthroughs in Moscow talks
Saturday’s meeting in Moscow lasted more than three hours behind closed doors and ended without any major developments being announced. Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, described the talks as constructive, frank and useful, but he didn’t discuss specific outcomes.
While Moscow offered its “comprehensive assessment” of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, Ushakov said, the talks weren’t purely focused on the war in Ukraine.
“Economic issues and potentially large, mutually beneficial joint projects for Russia and America were discussed in considerable detail,” he said.
The last known visit to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner was in January when they also held talks with Putin at the Kremlin.
Russia and Ukraine continue to exchange fire
Putin and Zelenskyy had agreed to pause strikes on each other’s capitals while the talks take place. Still, the two traded fire overnight into Sunday, officials said.
Russian attacks across multiple Ukrainian regions killed one person and wounded at least 10 others overnight into Sunday, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
In Zaporizhzhia, drone strikes killed a 74-year-old man and wounded three people, while a drone damaged an apartment building, wounding seven people, in the Khmelnytskyi region.
Ukraine’s air force said Sunday that it intercepted 82 drones out of the 108 launched by Russia overnight, along with six missiles.
In Russia, a man was killed and a woman was seriously wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a vehicle, local authorities in the Belgorod border region said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Sunday that its air defenses overnight shot down 258 Ukrainian drones over 14 Russian regions, the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula and the waters of the Black and Azov Seas.
Mixed hopes on the ground
In Kyiv on Sunday, dozens gathered for a nationwide 9 a.m. moment of silence honoring Ukraine’s fallen soldiers, a daily ritual held in cities across the country.
Nataliia Lipei, 67, whose son Viktor was killed in December 2022, was among those who attended. Despite a health condition, she has traveled from city to city to take part, and she said that she hopes the talks in Moscow and Kyiv will finally bring an end to the war.
“I hope these steps and these meetings will definitely produce results, because there has been so much bloodshed and so many deaths here that we have to stop all of this,” Lipei told The Associated Press.
Not everyone shared her hope for the talks. Oleksandr Pastukhov, a 27-year-old video editor who joined the commemoration, was skeptical that the envoys’ visit would change anything.
“We’ve already seen delegations like this come here before,” he said. “We’ve seen this so-called ceasefire for three days, which ended after just a couple of hours, and now we’re supposed to naively think that two people will come and change something.”
In his Sunday prayer, Pope Leo XIV renewed his appeal for peace in Ukraine and said he hopes the negotiations will bring results.
“I hope that the efforts undertaken in recent days to resume negotiations will bear concrete fruit and make way for diplomacy,” he told the gathered faithful in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
___ Volodymyr Yurchuk and Yevhenii Ocheretianyi in Kyiv, and Elise Morton in London, contributed to this report.
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