Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev is traveling to Miami for meetings with Donald Trump representatives, including the US President’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and White House adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to a Russian government source speaking to Reuters.
The talks expected to take place in Miami over the weekend follow negotiations in Berlin earlier this week between Witkoff and Kushner with Ukrainian and European officials, as part of efforts to find an agreement that would end the war that erupted in February 2022. The two were also scheduled to meet with Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov yesterday in the Florida city. The Moscow source, informed about the trip’s details, noted that a meeting between Dmitriev and Ukrainian negotiators in Miami has been ruled out.
“No trilateral contacts with the Ukrainian side are planned,” added the Reuters source in the Russian government, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ukraine war: Difficulties in finding agreement
The Trump administration is pushing to end the nearly four-year war, but bridging the positions of the opposing sides – Ukraine and Russia – as well as European Union leaders on issues ranging from Kiev’s potential NATO membership to possible territorial concessions is anything but easy.
Witkoff and Kushner have been working with EU and Ukrainian negotiators to draft a new and modified peace plan. The initial version of the text had been criticized by Brussels and Kiev, who considered it excessively favorable to Moscow.
The Russian presidency stated on December 12th that it has not yet received the most recent version of the plan, which was modified with input from Ukrainian and European officials.
Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, who is not traveling to the US for these talks, warned that Moscow may reject some of the new proposals contained in the plan.
The Kremlin insists that excluding any possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership is a fundamental condition of the negotiations.
Ushakov also said that declaring a ceasefire in Ukraine would only be feasible after Kiev’s forces withdraw from the entire Donbas region, implying that Russian troops would not move toward other areas under Ukrainian control.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reminded earlier this week that Russia’s opposition to the deployment of European troops in Ukraine, offered by the West to Kiev as one of the security guarantees within a potential future US-brokered agreement, is well known to all parties, while adding that this issue could also be discussed.
