US special envoy Steve Witkoff is travelling to Russia for direct talks with President Vladimir Putin on ending the war in Ukraine, moving the latest American diplomatic push from Oslo to Moscow within a matter of days.
The Moscow visit follows discussions in the Norwegian capital on Tuesday, where Witkoff met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alongside the leaders of Finland and Norway. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described those talks as positive, while Zelenskyy said Washington had reaffirmed its commitment to security guarantees for Kyiv.
Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine
Speaking in Oslo late on Tuesday, Zelenskyy welcomed the American engagement but drew a firm line on process. Any agreement concerning Ukraine’s future, he said, would be acceptable only if Kyiv had a seat at the negotiating table. He confirmed he had discussed with US officials a reported proposal for a trilateral meeting involving the United States, China and Russia, and repeated the line that has defined his country’s position throughout: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.
The trip comes days after Washington waived new Russia sanctions a day before they were due to take effect, citing the national interest. The back-to-back moves point to an administration trying to keep pressure and diplomacy in play at the same time.
A familiar shuttle with a narrow window
Witkoff knows the route well. He and fellow envoy Jared Kushner spent more than three hours with Putin behind closed doors at the Kremlin in early September, talks the Russian side called constructive but which produced no announced breakthrough. Days later the pair described their follow-up meetings in Kyiv as substantive, although the central impasse, Moscow’s insistence that territorial concessions are non-negotiable set against Kyiv’s refusal to cede land, remained untouched.
The careful language around this week’s travel is telling. Calling talks positive signals momentum without promising outcomes, and the physical shuttling between capitals suggests the stakes are judged too high for remote diplomacy. Whether the Moscow leg yields more than atmospherics should become clear in the coming days. At home, the administration is fighting on several fronts at once, with the Justice Department suing California to halt the counting of ballots from alleged noncitizens as the midterm campaign intensifies.
NPR’s morning briefing listed the Moscow trip among the day’s leading developments, an indication of how central the diplomacy has become to Washington’s autumn agenda.
