US envoys hold ‘encouraging’ talks in Kyiv after meeting Putin in Moscow

The trip by the Americans follows a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, as both sides have escalated their aerial attacks.

Washington’s push to end the fighting has lost momentum, with the Trump administration focused for the past six months on the Iran war.

Russia has recently been using fast-flying, jet-powered drones, and the recurring wail of air-raid sirens has become part of daily life in Kyiv. Troops have struggled to make progress along the 1,250-km (775-mile) front line.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a news conference that the discussions covered air defence needs – including Patriot systems – and a “winter package” of support covering both air defence and energy infrastructure before the colder months.

He said Kyiv was seeking “serious volumes” of American support on that front, with backing from European partners as well.

The Ukrainian president said the US planned to increase production of Patriot interceptor missiles next year, with Germany also expanding its own production under existing licensing agreements.

Mr Zelensky said Russia had intensified strikes on Ukrainian cities before Russia’s State Duma election later this month, calling the attacks deliberate “terror” against civilians, and said Ukraine was working with 67 domestic companies developing systems to shoot down Russia’s jet-powered drones at scale.

The Ukrainian leader said the territorial question “remains relevant”, but reiterated his view that such difficult issues “can only be resolved at the level of leaders”.

Mr Zelensky said the talks also touched on long-term security guarantees and economic support for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction. He said a strong Ukrainian army remained “one of the main guarantees of security”.

Mr Zelensky said the sides had agreed to hold a follow-up meeting involving Ukraine, the US and Europe, though a location has not been set.

Mr Witkoff said the US was pursuing “a diplomatic resolution to this conflict, not a kinetic resolution”.

Referring to the previous day’s talks, he said that the meeting in Moscow had produced “new ideas” that were later brought to Kyiv, and pointed to the presence of national security advisers from the so-called E3 nations – France, Germany and the UK – as evidence that “collaboration is critical” to reaching a deal.

Both sides would need to make compromises, Mr Witkoff said, adding: “We think we have the ingredients to get to that place.”

Asked whether Washington was prepared to increase pressure on Russia if the talks produced no breakthrough, Mr Kushner said the US approach was to look for a “win-win” outcome.

He said that his father-in-law, US President Donald Trump, was focused not just on ending the fighting but on building “a framework that could actually lead to a durable peace”, and that he and Mr Witkoff had held a “constructive and substantive” meeting with Mr Putin a day earlier, discussing what Russia, Ukraine and the wider world could each gain from a settlement.

Mr Kushner said the two envoys hoped to revive trilateral talks involving Russia and Ukraine directly, a format last used roughly six months earlier, and said that Washington remained in near-daily contact with Ukrainian officials even between visits.

Saturday’s meeting in Moscow lasted more than three hours behind closed doors and ended without announcements of any breakthroughs. Mr Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, described them afterward as constructive, frank and useful but did not discuss specific outcomes.

While Moscow offered its “comprehensive assessment” of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, Mr Ushakov said, the talks were not purely focused on the war in Ukraine.

“Economic issues and potentially large, mutually beneficial joint projects for Russia and America were discussed in considerable detail,” he said.

The air war between Russia and Ukraine has intensified as troops have struggled to make progress along the 1,250-kilometre (775-mile) front line.

Russia has recently been using fast-flying, jet-powered drones, and the recurring wail of air-raid sirens has become part of daily life in Kyiv.

Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky had agreed to pause strikes on each other’s capitals while the talks take place. Still, the two traded fire overnight into Sunday, officials said.

Russian attacks across multiple Ukrainian regions killed one person and injured at least 10 others overnight into Sunday, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.

In Zaporizhzhia, drone strikes killed a 74-year-old man and wounded three people, while a drone damaged an apartment building, injuring seven people, in the Khmelnytskyi region.

Ukraine’s air force said on Sunday that it intercepted 82 drones out of the 108 launched by Russia overnight, along with six missiles.

In Russia, a man was killed and a woman seriously wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck a vehicle, local authorities in the Belgorod border region said.

The Russian Defence Ministry said that its air defences overnight shot down 258 Ukrainian drones over 14 Russian regions, occupied Crimea and the waters of the Black and Azov seas.

In Kyiv on Sunday, dozens gathered for a nationwide 9am moment of silence honouring Ukraine’s fallen soldiers, a daily ritual held in cities across the country.

Among them was Nataliia Lipei, 67, whose son Viktor was killed in December 2022. Despite a health condition, she has travelled from city to city to take part, and she said she hopes the talks in Moscow and Kyiv will finally bring an end to the war.

“I hope these steps and these meetings will definitely produce results, because there has been so much bloodshed and so many deaths here that we have to stop all of this,” she told The Associated Press.

Not everyone shared her hope for the talks. Oleksandr Pastukhov, 27, a video editor who joined the commemoration, was sceptical the envoys’ visit would change anything.

“We’ve already seen delegations like this come here before,” he said. “We’ve seen this so-called ceasefire for three days, which ended after just a couple of hours, and now we’re supposed to naively think that two people will come and change something.”