Trump envoys Witkoff and Kushner hold two-hour Kremlin talks with Putin after Abu Dhabi round

US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Thursday for talks on ending the war in Ukraine, flying in from Abu Dhabi, where two days of three-way negotiations with Russian and Ukrainian delegations had ended a day earlier.

Russian state news agency TASS said the meeting began at about 3.05 pm Moscow time and lasted more than two hours. Putin's foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky and special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who received the Americans at Vnukovo airport, also took part, TASS reported. No detailed account of the outcome had been released by either side.

Little movement on territory

The Moscow meeting was Witkoff's tenth in-person encounter with Putin, The Moscow Times reported. Asked by a reporter at his hotel whether peace was getting closer, Witkoff said: "I hope so." Kushner earlier said the US side saw "some openings and some opportunities", the Kyiv Independent reported.

The Abu Dhabi talks on 10 and 11 November, the first US-mediated direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv in about nine months, produced agreement on a large prisoner-of-war exchange but no ceasefire. Territory remains the main sticking point: Kyiv has rejected Russia's demand that it give up the whole of the eastern Donbas region, and US officials acknowledged that major differences remained.

Strikes continue

Hours after the Abu Dhabi round closed, Russia launched ballistic missiles at Kyiv around 1 am on Thursday, the Kyiv Independent reported, with explosions heard in the capital minutes after an air force warning. Russian forces also hit energy infrastructure in Khmelnytskyi region, causing power outages, according to the regional governor. Separately, Finland's military said it had detected a strike on a Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland on Wednesday, without saying what caused it, Reuters reported.

The envoys were due to travel to Dublin to brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is attending an informal meeting of EU leaders on 13 November. Ushakov also said on Thursday that Russia, China and the US were working on an agenda for a possible meeting of Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump on the sidelines of the upcoming APEC summit in China, TASS reported.

Why it matters

India has repeatedly called for dialogue to end the war, which has affected global energy and fertiliser markets. A three-way leaders' meeting at APEC, if it takes place, would be the clearest sign yet of a push to settle the conflict at the top level.