US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential special envoys Steve Witkoff and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg will spend today and tomorrow in Paris to discuss joint efforts to kick start peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, as well as the fate of the “coalition of the willing,” a UK- and French-led mission of over 30 nations that would uphold a potential ceasefire deal with Russia, two senior US officials told Kyiv Post’s Washington correspondent.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
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The State Department on Wednesday formally announced Rubio and Witkoff’s trip to Paris, noting, without details, that that they would hold talks with European partners to promote US President Donald Trump’s plan to “end the Russia-Ukraine war and stop the bloodshed.”
The pair were also joined by Kellogg in Paris as they left Washington Wednesday evening, senior officials told Kyiv Post. The delegation is expected to meet top diplomats of France and the UK in Paris, alongside other partners and leaders, sources said.
“The main question is how to bridge the gap between strategy and execution and achieve our peace goals, and, of course, what to do with the coalition of the willing,” one Trump official told Kyiv Post ahead of the Paris talks.
The Trump administration has never attended the coalition’s meetings, despite suggestions from some allied leaders, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is set to meet with Trump in Washington today.
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Several European diplomats had highlighted the coalition’s significance during their conversations with Rubio at a NATO foreign ministers meeting, which took place in Brussels earlier this month.
“We can’t really speak to those discussions [within] the coalition,” a Senior State Department official told Kyiv Post’s correspondent during the meeting. “We had not been a part of this.”
In the meantime, senior officials told Kyiv Post on Wednesday that European diplomats had also highlighted questions about the coalition’s viability, which they believe would likely rely on eventual Trump administration support, especially in the form of military aid, something the Trump administration deems as challenging in deference to the Kremlin’s opposition.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in his latest interview in Russian media chided UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron for “being obsessed with this idea of peacekeepers and are busy cobbling up a coalition of the willing.”
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