After Putin meeting, US envoys to host Ukraine advisor in Miami
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As is his habit, Vladimir Putin made Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son in law Jared Kushner wait three hours before meeting with them in Moscow Tuesday evening. And there was apparently no major breakthrough reached in their five hour meeting, which both sides nevertheless called constructive. But Russia seems to be succeeding at stringing the Trump administration along into an iterative process under which Trump increasingly pressures Ukraine to move closer to Russia’s demands, and which divides the U.S. from its European and NATO allies.
Trump today repeated his usual blather about believing that Putin would like to end the war, before concluding with his typical hedge, “we’ll see what happens.”
Putin “would like to end the war,” Trump said today. “That was their (Witkoff and Kushner’s) impression. I think he’d like to get back to dealing a more normal life. I think he’d like to be trading with the United States of America instead of losing thousands of soldiers a week. Their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal. We’ll see what happens.”
Earlier, a senior U.S. official said the two sides had a productive meeting, and that Witkoff and Kushner had invited Ukraine’s Rustem Umerov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, for follow up talks in Miami on Thursday, and he had agreed.
“The United States and Russia participated in a thorough, productive meeting,” the senior US official said. “Special Envoy Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have since briefed President Trump and the Ukrainians.”
As to Witkoff and Kushner skipping a possible meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Brussels on their way back from Moscow, the US official said the timing did not work out.
“US representatives never confirmed a meeting in Europe with President Zelensky. Ultimately, it was not feasible with timing,” the US official said. “Special Envoy Witkoff and Mr. Kushner invited Secretary Umerov to Miami for a meeting tomorrow, and Secretary Umerov agreed.”
Kremlin foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov emphasized American-Russian consultations would be ongoing, excluding both Ukraine and the Europeans.
“The conversation was very useful, constructive, substantive, and lasted five hours,” Ushakov said in a readout of the Kushner/Witkoff Putin meeting.
“Naturally, together with our American colleagues, we discussed the contents of the documents that the US had handed over to Moscow some time ago,” Ushakov said. “There were points with which we could agree, and
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