MOSCOW, Jan 22 – Russian President Vladimir Putin will on Thursday discuss a possible peace plan for Ukraine with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Moscow after President Donald Trump said a deal to end the war was “reasonably close”.
The United States has held talks with Russia, and separately with Kyiv and European leaders, on various different drafts of a plan for ending the war in Ukraine, but no deal has yet been reached despite Trump’s repeated promises to clinch one.
Putin, speaking at a Russian Security Council meeting late on Wednesday, said that he would meet Trump special envoy Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Kushner in Moscow to “continue dialogue on the Ukrainian settlement” as well as Trump’s “Board of Peace” idea and the possibility of using frozen Russian assets.
At stake is how to end the deadliest war in Europe since World War Two, the future of Ukraine, the extent to which European powers are sidelined and whether or not a peace deal brokered by the United States will endure.
“I think I can say that we’re reasonably close,” Trump said. “We have to get it stopped … I believe they’re at a point now where they can come together and get a deal done.
“And if they don’t, they’re stupid,” Trump said, referring to Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Last week, Trump told Reuters that Zelenskiy was the main impediment to reaching an agreement.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, triggering the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
Ukraine and European leaders say that Russia cannot be allowed to achieve its aims after what they cast as an imperial-style land grab. If Russia wins, European powers say, then it will one day attack NATO. Moscow says such claims are ridiculous and that it has no intention of attacking a NATO member.
Russia says that European leaders are intent on scuttling the peace talks by introducing conditions that they know will be unacceptable to Russia, which took 12 to 17 square km (4.6-6.6 square miles) of Ukrainian territory per day in 2025.
Putin, who has repeatedly said he is open to discussing peace, casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.
(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
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