Ukraine Endgame: Kyiv Waits, West Counts the Cost
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have left Moscow and are travelling to Kyiv, where they are expected to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to the BBC and The Guardian.
Ukraine Endgame: Kyiv Waits, West Counts the Cost
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have left Moscow and are travelling to Kyiv, where they are expected to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to the BBC and The Guardian. The White House says the two sides discussed "substantive plans" for ending the war in Ukraine, with formal announcements expected in the coming weeks.
What those plans contain, no one outside the room is saying. The language from Washington is deliberate in its vagueness — "next steps," "productive meetings," a diplomatic vocabulary engineered to signal momentum without committing to anything that could be measured or held against them later.
Zelenskyy, who was not in Moscow, now receives the American delegation knowing only what they chose to carry with them from Putin's table. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the architecture of the negotiation — one side in the room when the terms were shaped, the other side handed the result and asked to call it progress.
The European Union has not been consulted in any capacity that has been made public. NATO allies have been watching from outside the frame. Forty-four months of Ukrainian dead, and the diplomacy lands in the hands of two men whose primary qualification is proximity to a single American president.
Ukraine's leverage is not gone, but it is diminishing with every meeting that happens without it. The Kyiv talks may be warmer in tone. They will not be equal in weight.
