Trump’s envoys meet Putin in Moscow for over two hours, and a face-to-face at APEC is already on the table

Russian President Vladimir Putin received U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, in Moscow on Thursday in a meeting that lasted more than two hours as they try to unblock the peace negotiations on Ukraine.

The meeting comes after two days of talks between the United States, Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi, which ended without a ceasefire agreement but with a concrete step forward: an agreement in principle for a large-scale prisoner-of-war exchange, which Kushner described as possibly the largest since the start of the invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had proposed exchanging between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners from each side.

The hardest point remains territory: Moscow demands that Kyiv give up all of the Donbas, something Ukraine rejects. Putin also insisted that he will never accept a deployment of European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, and proposed creating a humanitarian corridor in Kostiantynivka, a disputed city where, he said, between 400 and 500 civilians remain. Kyiv suspects the proposal is only meant to rotate Russian troops.

Putin’s adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Trump and Putin could meet face to face again next week, during the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, and did not even rule out a trilateral meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

After the Kremlin meeting, Witkoff and Kushner will travel to Dublin to meet with Zelenskyy and brief him on what was discussed in Moscow.

Photo: El Folio

Source: El País