Trump speaks on Russia-Ukraine peace talks: Witkoff, Kushner had 'reasonably good meeting' with Putin despite no breakthrough

Photo: The White House

Trump speaks on Russia-Ukraine peace talksPresident Donald Trump took questions from reporters about the peace talks related to the Russian-Ukraine war, ABC News reports.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner had a "reasonably good meeting" with Russian President Vladimir Putin during high-stakes negotiations in Moscow, adding that the U.S. negotiators believed Putin "would like to end the war."

"I don't know what the Kremlin is doing. I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We're going to find out. It's a war that should have never been started," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump said he spoke with Witkoff and Kushner Tuesday night following their meeting at the Kremlin.

"He would like to end the war," Trump said of Putin. "That was their impression. Now, whether or not you know that was their impression, you know their impression was that they'd like to see he would like to see the war ended."

"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, frankly, instead of, you know, losing thousands of soldiers a week. But their impression was very strongly that he'd like to make a deal," Trump said of Putin.

Though both sides in the negotiations – led by Witkoff and Kushner from the U.S. – and Putin who conducted negotiations in Moscow – vowed secrecy and provided no comprehensive briefings of their discussion, it became clear that a deal for peace was not yet in hand as Trump has long desired.

"So far no compromise option has been found, but some American proposals appear more or less acceptable," said Putin's top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, who was in the room for the Moscow meeting and spoke to Russian media afterward. "The president did not hide our critical or negative view of certain proposals."

"We agreed on some things... while others caused criticism, and the president [Putin] also made no secret of our critical, even negative, attitude toward a number of proposals. But the main thing is that we had a very useful discussion," Ushakov said.

None of the parties involved in the negotiations this week has detailed the current version of the proposal.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was not part of the American delegation sent to Moscow, said late Tuesday that "some progress" had been made on the truce proposal, but "we're still not there – we're still not close enough."

He also highlighted a major sticking point in the peace deal: Moscow's continued demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the entire Donbas region. Ukraine has long rejected ceding territory to Russia.

Witkoff and Kushner have invited Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov to Miami on Thursday for further peace talks, according to a senior U.S. administration official.

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