Steve Witkoff, a U.S. envoy, will travel to Moscow later this week to continue discussions regarding ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.
This will be the third in-person meeting of senior U.S. and Russian diplomats since President Donald Trump took office, though it will mark their first since Ukraine agreed to the U.S.-proposed 30-day ceasefire.
“Mr. Witkoff is traveling to Moscow later this week, and we urge the Russians to sign on to this plan. This is the closest we have been to peace in this war,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday. “We are at the 10-yard line, and the president is expecting the Russians to help us run this into the end zone.”
Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with senior Ukrainian officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a day earlier.
The U.S. and Ukrainian leaders released a joint statement affirming that Ukraine “expressed readiness to accept the U.S. proposal to enact an immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire,” effectively keeping the ball in Moscow’s court.
“We’re going to tell them this is what’s on the table, Ukraine is ready to stop shooting and start talking, and now it’ll be up to them to say yes or no,” Rubio said after the meeting. “I hope they’re going to say yes. And if they do, then I think we made great progress. If they say no, then we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace here.”
Trump said last week he was “strongly considering” putting “large scale” sanctions and tariffs on Russia until it agreed to end the war.
Russia currently occupies roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory, and the front lines have largely remained unchanged for more than a year.
Russian leaders have already said they are not willing to give up Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, nor would it accept NATO deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine as a part of any ceasefire agreement.
Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have had an up-and-down relationship dating back to his connection to Trump’s first impeachment during his first term in office. Since returning to the White House, Trump has sought to end the war in Ukraine at all costs, which has raised concerns among Ukrainians and European countries that it could pressure Kyiv to accept less favorable terms simply to stop the fighting.
Trump threw Zelensky out of the White House last month after the two, along with Vice President JD Vance, got into a heated discussion in the Oval Office. They did not sign a long-term economic minerals agreement that they planned on signing. It remains unsigned and in the aftermath of the dust up, the U.S. stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine and halted military aid.
The U.S. agreed to lift both pauses following the meeting in Jeddah on Tuesday.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and he’s had the unilateral ability to end the war every day since then. Instead, he has sent hundreds of thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties.
A U.S. official said in October 2024 that 600,000 Russian troops had been killed or injured in the three years of conflict.
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Witkoff traveled to Russia in mid-February, the first known trip by a senior U.S. official since before the war began, and during that visit, he secured the release of detained American Marc Fogel. Fogel was sentenced to a 14-year prison sentence in June 2022 after he was detained the year prior on drug charges.
