Kremlin talks stretch past midnight as U.S. envoys and Putin again fail to bridge peace-plan gap on Ukraine war

Russian and U.S. negotiators met at the Kremlin for nearly five hours on Tuesday, concluding talks roughly 30 minutes after midnight, the newspaper Kommersant reported. The Russian delegation included Vladimir Putin, advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The United States was represented by Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

During the meeting, the American envoys presented Putin with Washington’s peace plan, updated after last weekend’s negotiations with Ukraine.

After the talks at the Kremlin, Steve Witkoff reportedly went to the U.S. Embassy without making any statements to the press. Following the meeting, Kirill Dmitriev tweeted that it had been “productive.”

Yuri Ushakov later told reporters that the two sides did not reach a compromise on the territorial terms of the American peace plan for Ukraine. “We reviewed the contents of the drafts the Americans handed over to Moscow some time ago, and did not discuss specific wording or concrete proposals, but rather the essence of what they contain,” Ushakov explained. He also confirmed that Moscow had received four additional documents beyond the Trump administration’s original 28-point plan for resolving the situation in Ukraine. “Some American proposals are acceptable to the Russian Federation, and some are not,” Ushakov said.