Kushner and Witkoff meet Putin at the Kremlin after Abu Dhabi talks end without a breakthrough

The Moscow visit

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the United States envoys, met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Thursday. Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev met them at their plane in the morning and went with them into central Moscow; videos shared by Russian media showed handshakes and hugs, the BBC reported. The talks with Putin began a few hours later.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Moscow, Yulia Shapovalova, said the American team would bring Putin an updated proposal for a peace plan, and that one of its aims was to persuade him to let European countries into the negotiations. Ukraine and the US want the Europeans involved, she said, while Moscow insists on talks without them.

On Tuesday Kushner had said the US saw “some openings and some opportunities”. After Moscow, the two envoys are expected to fly to Dublin to meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

What Abu Dhabi produced

The visit follows two days of three-way talks in the United Arab Emirates that ended in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. According to Al Jazeera, they were the first direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine mediated by the US in nine months. They produced news of another large prisoner exchange, but no breakthrough on ending a war that has lasted nearly five years.

The US said differences remained on the main issues, including territory, though some progress had been made on security guarantees after the war. Kyiv has firmly rejected Putin’s demand that it give up the whole of its eastern Donbas region in return for peace. The Guardian reported that Putin also repeated Moscow’s opposition to Western troops in Ukraine.

Starlink trouble at the front

While the envoys were in Moscow, Zelensky said Ukraine’s military was again facing “systematic” restrictions on Starshield, the military-grade Starlink service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He said the disruption had lasted several days and was making it harder to intercept Russian jet-powered drones.

Zelensky said Kyiv was trying to get details from the American side and so far knew very little. According to the BBC, a similar problem hit the front line in late October and lasted about a week; it was never made clear who ordered it, and US officials and SpaceX gave different explanations.