Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner completed a rapid diplomatic circuit on Sept. 6 that took them from more than three hours of talks with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin to several rounds of discussions with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. The U.S. side is now openly talking about bringing Russia and Ukraine back into a common negotiating format.
In Kyiv, Witkoff said the American delegation had heard “new ideas” in Moscow and hoped a fresh round of U.S.-mediated Ukraine-Russia talks could be announced soon. He did not explain what the Kremlin had proposed or which of those ideas Washington believes could form the basis of further negotiations.
Zelensky described the talks with Witkoff and Kushner as “very substantive” and confirmed that Ukraine was ready for trilateral negotiations involving the United States and Russia. Yet the Sunday meetings produced no ceasefire announcement, no agreed document and no date for the next round.
The diplomatic picture is therefore unusually mixed. After months of limited movement, the negotiating channel is clearly active again, but none of the fundamental disputes that stalled earlier efforts has disappeared. Washington now has fresh positions from both capitals, but it has not yet shown where Moscow and Kyiv have actually moved closer.
Daycom’s analysis of publicly available and verified material indicates that the main result of the Witkoff-Kushner mission is not the proximity of a finished peace deal, but the restoration of full-scale shuttle diplomacy. U.S. mediators are now trying to turn separate conversations with Moscow and Kyiv into a shared negotiating process.
Witkoff’s optimism in Kyiv was notably stronger than the Kremlin’s own description of the Moscow meeting. He said the U.S. side had made “a lot of progress” with Putin, while Russian officials limited themselves to calling the talks highly useful and announced no concrete concession by Moscow.
Putin, by contrast, used the meeting to stress what Russia describes as progress on the battlefield and confidence that its goals can still be achieved. Moscow also continues to insist that any agreement must address the “root causes” of the conflict — a phrase that reaches far beyond a technical halt to the fighting.
That makes Witkoff’s reference to “new ideas” the central mystery of the next phase. If those ideas merely repackage Russia’s existing demands, the room for compromise will remain extremely narrow. If Moscow has in fact accepted a different territorial or security framework, it would represent the first substantive shift of the current negotiating cycle.
The most difficult issue remains Donbas. Russia has previously demanded that Ukraine withdraw from a belt of towns and territory it still controls in the east. Kyiv has refused, arguing that Ukrainian forces can continue to defend those positions and should not surrender them at the negotiating table.
Zelensky framed the issue bluntly after Sunday’s meeting, saying that the question of Donbas is essentially the question of the war itself. That means progress on other parts of a potential settlement may still be insufficient if Moscow and Kyiv cannot find a formula for eastern Ukraine.
For Kyiv, the territorial dispute is inseparable from security guarantees. Ukraine insists that any end to the fighting must be backed by military and political arrangements capable of making another Russian invasion substantially more difficult and costly.
Those guarantees were discussed in Kyiv alongside economic support and a postwar “prosperity plan.” Zelensky stressed that Ukraine’s own military should remain one of the country’s core security guarantees, supported by long-term resources, investment and a viable economic base.
That pushes the negotiations far beyond the question of where a ceasefire line might run. Washington is effectively trying to combine three tasks: ending the war, creating a durable deterrent for the period after it and giving Ukraine an economic model strong enough to sustain a lasting peace.
National security advisers from Britain, France and Germany joined the final part of the Kyiv discussions. Their participation suggests that Washington is not attempting to separate a future settlement from Europe, particularly on questions of defense guarantees, military support and postwar financing.
Zelensky said Ukraine, the United States and European partners had agreed to continue consultations soon. The venue has not yet been fixed and could be in Europe, the United States or Ukraine. At the same time, U.S. officials are seeking a renewed trilateral format involving Russia.
Kyiv is also planning for a very different scenario: another winter of war. Zelensky said the talks covered additional air-defense support, protection of the energy system and broader energy assistance as Ukraine prepares for the possibility of renewed Russian attacks on critical infrastructure.
That part of the conversation is one of the clearest limits on the current optimism. Ukraine is discussing peace while simultaneously preparing for the war to continue into winter. Kyiv does not appear to be treating the latest diplomatic momentum as evidence that hostilities are about to end.
Patriot systems, other air defenses, energy protection and fuel supplies are therefore not peripheral issues. They are insurance against the possibility that diplomacy again stalls or produces only a temporary pause.
Even the logistics of the U.S. mission illustrated how heavily the war still shapes diplomacy. Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Kyiv after Moscow under security arrangements dictated by the continuing threat of Russian air attacks.
Russia agreed to suspend strikes on Kyiv during the mission, while Ukraine said it would refrain from attacks on Moscow. But the arrangement was limited to the two capitals and did not constitute a broader ceasefire. Fighting along the front and strikes elsewhere continued.
Russia continued attacking other Ukrainian regions, while Ukraine said on Sept. 6 that it had struck the Ryazan oil refinery deep inside Russian territory. The renewed diplomatic push is therefore unfolding in parallel with an active long-range air war.
That allows both sides to negotiate without giving up military pressure. For Moscow, battlefield operations remain a way to improve the terms of any future settlement. For Ukraine, strikes on Russian energy and industrial targets are intended to raise the cost of continuing the war and challenge the Kremlin’s assumption that time is working only in Russia’s favor.
There is also a political clock. Zelensky has argued that the present diplomatic opportunity matters because U.S. politics will increasingly turn toward the 2028 presidential election cycle. From Kyiv’s perspective, sustained attention from the Trump administration cannot be assumed indefinitely.
That gives the current U.S. initiative a limited political window. The closer Washington moves toward its next election season, the harder it may become to keep Ukraine diplomacy at the center of the administration’s foreign-policy agenda.
Trump has pushed the peace process back into a more active phase after previous U.S.-led efforts produced little. Before the latest trip, he said Washington had a new proposal, but its terms have still not been made public, leaving the most important part of the American strategy outside public view.
Witkoff and Kushner are now functioning as classic shuttle diplomats. They first heard Putin’s position, then carried the substance of the Moscow discussions to Kyiv almost immediately, and can now relay Ukraine’s response back to the Russian side.
That mechanism can prepare the ground for direct talks, but it cannot guarantee success. Its main advantage is speed: positions can be compared, clarified and tested without waiting weeks for separate diplomatic channels to move.
It is also notable that this was Witkoff and Kushner’s first visit to Kyiv specifically in their capacity as U.S. peace negotiators, even though they had already traveled to Moscow several times. Ukrainian officials had long sought such a direct format, arguing that their position should not be assessed only through contacts with the Kremlin or remote consultations.
The next phase now has several concrete tests. The first is whether a date is set for trilateral talks involving Ukraine, Russia and the United States. The second is whether a genuinely new territorial formula appears. The third is whether security guarantees become specific enough for Kyiv to judge them as a credible deterrent.
A fourth test will be whether the temporary pause in strikes can be broadened. If restraint over Moscow and Kyiv ends as soon as the U.S. envoys leave, it will remain a diplomatic safety measure. If the parties attempt to expand it geographically or extend it in time, that would amount to a substantive negotiating result.
For now, the rhetoric remains more optimistic than the facts. Witkoff speaks of progress and new ideas, Zelensky of substantive talks and readiness for a trilateral format, and the Kremlin of useful negotiations. But the central dispute over Donbas remains unresolved.
That is why the Moscow-Kyiv mission is better understood as the beginning of a new negotiating cycle than as the beginning of the end of the war. Its main achievement is that Washington has connected Russian and Ukrainian positions within a single, rapid diplomatic circuit.
The next step will show whether the United States can turn the “new ideas” Witkoff says he heard in Moscow into a text that both sides are at least willing to discuss. Until then, Ukraine-Russia talks have gained new momentum, but not yet a new foundation.
At the same time, Kyiv is preparing for winter, Moscow is continuing the war and U.S. officials are searching for the format of the next meeting. That may be the most accurate description of the current moment: diplomacy is back at the center of events, but neither side is behaving as though the war is truly close to ending.
