US envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will travel to Russia today, January 22, for talks with Putin on the latest proposals for a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine.
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Witkoff noted that “the Ukrainians said we were 90% done” with the peace plan, and he agrees with them, but Kyiv and Moscow remain at an impasse on key issues, including Putin’s demands for control over territory that belongs to Ukraine, Bloomberg writes.
“The Russians invited us to come, and it's a big statement from them,” Witkoff told Bloomberg Television's Annemarie Gordern at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Jared and I will be going to Moscow on Thursday.”
US President Donald Trump, during questions after his speech at the Davos forum, said that, in his opinion, Russia and Ukraine “are now at a point where they can come together and make a deal.”
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“And if they don't, then they're stupid — that goes for both of them — but I know they're not stupid,” he said.
Trump later said he planned to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Witkoff said he would meet with Ukrainian officials, including chief negotiator Rustam Umerov, before traveling to Moscow, and then travel to the United Arab Emirates to plan working group cooperation.
Zelensky was expected to visit Davos for possible talks with Trump, although on Tuesday he said he would likely abandon plans to attend the forum unless agreements on security guarantees and a plan to revive the country's economy were signed with the United States.
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Putin received a draft peace plan earlier this month through his aide Kirill Dmitriev, which had been agreed upon with Ukrainian and European counterparts, according to people familiar with the matter. The documents were unofficially passed to Moscow for review, allowing Putin to prepare feedback and suggest changes ahead of an expected visit by Witkoff and Kushner.
The Kremlin saw the proposal as a significant step forward, sources said, although a final agreement was still far off. Many of the issues of interest to Moscow were either missing or formulated in a way that the Kremlin found unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, the inclusion of these topics and the fact that work on them had begun were welcomed. Russia believes that Kushner, who joined Witkoff for talks with Putin in Moscow last month, helped structure the negotiation process and establish a framework to guide the discussions, the sources said.
Officially, the Kremlin is still waiting for the results of the latest talks involving American, Ukrainian, and Russian officials to be presented to Putin.
Putin is expected to insist that what Moscow calls the “Anchorage Accords,” reached at his August summit with Trump in Alaska, remain part of any peace plan. Under the proposal, Russia seeks to gain control of the Donbas while freezing hostilities along the current contact lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions.
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The US proposals envisage transforming the unoccupied territory into a demilitarized or free economic zone under special administration. It is unclear whether the territory would be recognized as Russian under these plans, and what, if any, concessions Moscow is prepared to offer in return.
Previously, “FACTS” published an interview with historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, who believes that if anyone can stop this war, it is not America or Russia, but China.