President Donald Trump’s special envoy said Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to a “permanent peace” agreement with Ukraine, following high-level talks aimed at ending the war that has stretched beyond three years.
Trump has been urging Moscow and Kyiv to agree to a ceasefire, but repeated talks between US and Russian officials have yet to produce major concessions from the Kremlin.
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In a televised interview with Fox News on Monday, Witkoff said he believes a peace deal is “emerging,” and that two key Putin advisers - Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev - were in the “compelling meeting.”
“Putin’s request is to get to have a permanent peace here. So, beyond the ceasefire, we got an answer to that,” Witkoff said. “It took a while for us to get to this place.”
“I think we might be on the verge of something that would be very, very important for the world at large,” he added.
Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, met with Putin on Friday in Saint Petersburg, their third meeting since Trump returned to the Oval Office in January.
The talks were followed by a deadly Russian missile strike on Sunday, April 13, when two ballistic missiles with cluster munitions hit the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, killing 35 people and wounding more than 100 others.
Witkoff said the core of any potential agreement centers on “five territories,” though he did not elaborate. Russia maintains that any deal must acknowledge its control over areas of Ukraine it has occupied since 2014, including Crimea and significant portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
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In late 2022, Russia announced the annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions after holding what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine. Kyiv and Western governments said the votes breached international law and ruled them as illegitimate and non-representative.
Witkoff also said business ties were part of the negotiations, signaling the Trump administration’s broader interest in reshaping bilateral relations.
“I believe there’s a possibility to reshape the Russian–United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities, that I think give real stability to the region too,” Witkoff said.
Despite the diplomatic push, Trump’s central goal of securing a ceasefire in Ukraine remains elusive.
Last month, Putin rejected a joint US-Ukrainian proposal for a full and unconditional ceasefire. The Kremlin has also conditioned any truce in the Black Sea region on lifting specific Western sanctions.
Earlier on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the current dynamic in Russia–US relations is positive, but no “immediate results” should be expected from the negotiations between the two countries.
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