A Trump administration attempt to jump-start stalled Russo-Ukrainian peace talks not only failed to bring the warring sides closer together, but wound up delivering to Kyiv even tougher Kremlin terms, opposition Ukrainian parliament member Anna Skorokhod said on Monday.
The main message brought to Ukraine by a senior US diplomatic delegation led by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and New York real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff was that Russia remains unwilling to compromise or offer concessions. Moreover, the Kremlin used the American envoys to deliver a new set of demands to Kyiv.
“It was not only not a diplomatic breakthrough, they [Witkoff and Kushner] arrived with even worse conditions than we had before. We see that on both sides there is no desire to communicate directly rather than through envoys, or to sit down at the negotiating table together,” Skorokhod said in part.
Skorokhod is a Kyiv region parliament member who broke with the ruling Servant of the People (SoP) party in 2019, citing what she described as corruption and favoritism toward big business in the party’s land reform agenda. She is now a minority faction member usually critical of the SoP, with reform and closer Ukrainian integration to Europe at the top of her agenda.
“All these attempts [to restart the peace process], as we can see, aren’t successful,” she said. “And the result has been that the Russian Federation now is setting forth even worse conditions… unfortunately, we have another complete failure in negotiations.”Skorokhod’s comments, made to a widely watched news and political program, contrasted sharply with upbeat remarks by Witkoff on Sunday, when he told Kyiv reporters that the negotiating process was moving forward.
“I think we made significant progress in Moscow. We heard new ideas,” Witkoff said. “Jared [Kushner] and my job is to bring the sides together, reduce the differences between them, and establish effective channels of communication. Hopefully, we have started this constructively over the last 48 hours. We are confident that a successful solution can be found.”
According to Skorokhod, the Russian negotiating team headed by President Vladimir Putin, not only presented the Americans with a tougher set of demands for Ukraine but also made it clear to Witkoff and Kushner that the Kremlin would accept peace only on the terms dictated by Moscow. “If earlier [Russia] did not demand changes in the Ukrainian constitution conceding territories in the past, now they are,” Skorokhod said.
Russia’s most recent formal declaration of the peace terms it would accept from Ukraine, issued in June 2025, contained 31 demands amounting to Ukrainian capitulation. Among other conditions, the terms would require Ukraine to surrender roughly 20% of its territory to Russia, leaving an estimated 7 to 8 million Ukrainians as citizens of the Russian Federation.
Critically, Russia’s territorial demands call for Ukrainian forces to retreat from a New Jersey-sized area still under Kyiv’s control, clearing the way for Russian troops to occupy the territory and establish Kremlin rule.
Under Russian terms, Ukraine would also be required to declare neutrality, permanently abandon its bid for NATO membership and participation in other military alliances, ban foreign military forces from its territory, reaffirm its renunciation of nuclear weapons, cut its armed forces by approximately 80%, waive all claims for war damages against Russia, and remove all sanctions and tariffs on Russian goods and services.
Russian must also be made an official state language in Ukraine, the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church must be allowed to operate freely, and the Ukrainian government must hold national elections and remove all officials, elected and otherwise, deemed by Russia to be “Nazis,” according to the Kremlin’s policy statement.
Ukrainian official and public rejection of those terms is nearly unanimous. Ukraine’s longstanding red line, that it will never agree to the transfer of Ukrainian territory, property, or people into formal Russian Federation control because doing so would legitimize Russia’s unprovoked invasion, meant that Witkoff and Kushner’s trip to Ukraine and Russia “was just political theater,” Skorokhod said.
Skorokhod said she was aware of other new, harsher Russian peace terms delivered by Kushner and Witkoff to Kyiv from the Kremlin, but said she did not want to make them public because she had received the information by unofficial means.
In a Monday article titled “New Ideas, Old Deadlock,” the leading Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda (UP) argued that the main objective of the Kushner-Witkoff mission was to revive negotiations by introducing “new ideas” regarding the status of Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia. However, the publication concluded that the US initiative was effectively stillborn and wasteful because the Russian and Ukrainian positions remain too far apart.
“It is already clear that a peace agreement is still far away. And although Trump’s envoys came with new ideas, their content and Russia’s willingness to agree to them remain unknown,” UP said.
The Ukrainian television news channel 24 Kanal, in a Monday report titled “No Promises, No Forgiveness: What Did the Witkoff and Kushner Visit Bring Ukraine?,” similarly predicted that the US initiative would yield no meaningful results. The report pointed to a three-and-a-half-hour “working lunch” between the American envoys and their Russian counterparts at Moscow’s upscale Avrora restaurant, known for its seafood cuisine, as possible evidence that the US negotiating team was not acting as a neutral intermediary.
Russian state television channel Rossiya 1, which aired its own footage and reporting from the restaurant, said the Russian and US delegations held their lunch meeting in a secured third-floor room. The broadcast also showed Kushner and Witkoff walking past a pair of signs above the restaurant entrance bearing the slogan “Everything for Victory!”
“Everything for Victory!” is familiar to millions of Russian schoolchildren and virtually all Russian citizens as a famous Soviet World War II slogan urging the population to make sacrifices in support of the fight against the German invasion. Today, the phrase is widely used by Russian state media to encourage Russians to accept lower living standards and economic hardship in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Most Russian state media reports highlighted that the American delegation refreshed itself at a Moscow restaurant whose facade prominently displayed the well-known wartime slogan “Everything for Victory!” However, the coverage did not address whether Kushner and Witkoff were aware that they had been escorted to lunch beneath signage now used by the Russian state to rally public support for the war against Ukraine, nor whether they knew they were being photographed and filmed by state-controlled media as they entered the venue.
Avrora owner Anton Pinsky later published a video suggesting that the visit by the American delegation was a testament to the restaurant’s quality. As a mark of what he called the “honor” of hosting the talks, Pinsky said he would rename the third-floor private dining room the “Hall of Peaceful Negotiations.”
“We very much hope that this and future meetings there [in the Avrora private dining room] will bring a result to our country. A result, that will be in the interests of Russia,” Pinsky said in a comment attached to the video.
At a Monday press conference in Kyiv, Witkoff was asked by a local reporter how, as an American businessman, he could sit down for negotiations with Putin, the leader who launched Europe’s largest war since World War II and who is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over the unlawful deportation and transfer of thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. “We have always been received with respect by President Putin and his team. Relationships are crucial to resolving such conflicts,” Witkoff said.
During televised remarks to Putin on Sept. 5, Witkoff said: “First of all, President Putin, thank you so much for having us. We were sitting outside just now, me, Jared [Kushner], and [Russian chief negotiator] Kirill Dmitriev, and then [Putin senior aide] Yuri Ushakov joined us, and we were all talking about when we retire, we’ll have all these incredible stories and incredible memories, and yours [Putin’s] will be right at the top of it all.”