WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held productive talks with Ukraine’s senior negotiator Rustem Umerov in Miami over the past two days, U.S. officials said on Friday, with further talks scheduled for Saturday.
Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Umerov and General Andriy Hnatov, Ukraine’s military chief of general staff, for what both sides called “constructive discussions on advancing a credible pathway toward a durable and just peace in Ukraine.”
At Friday’s meeting, the group’s sixth of the past two weeks, Umerov underscored that Ukraine’s priority is to secure a settlement that protects its independence and sovereignty, ensures the safety of Ukrainians, and provides a stable foundation for a prosperous democratic future, the State Department and Umerov said in a joint statement.
The participants discussed the results of Witkoff and Kushner’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, and steps that would help end the war, it said.
Marathon talks in Moscow on Tuesday did not produce a compromise on a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, potentially aggravating Trump’s growing impatience with both Ukraine and Russia over the war. Trump has repeatedly complained that ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two has been one of the elusive foreign policy aims of his presidency. The U.S. president has at times scolded both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
During this week’s talks, U.S. and Ukrainian officials also agreed on “the framework of security arrangements and discussed necessary deterrence capabilities to sustain a lasting peace,” the State Department said, without spelling out details.
The two parties said real progress toward any agreement, however, would depend on Russia’s readiness to show a serious commitment to long-term peace, including steps toward de-escalation and an end to killings, it added.
In addition, they discussed Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, joint U.S.–Ukraine economic initiatives, and long-term recovery projects, the State Department said.
A White House official earlier said the meetings, which are taking place at an undisclosed location in Miami, were productive, adding: “Progress was made.”
Witkoff and Kushner had agreed before their meeting with Putin that they would brief their Ukrainian counterparts afterwards, a source familiar with the matter said.
Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s top foreign policy adviser, said on Friday that Putin and Witkoff had achieved a level of understanding that made their discussions “truly friendly.”
Putin met Witkoff and Kushner for five hours in the Kremlin and focused on a U.S.-backed plan for a settlement of the war in Ukraine, where Moscow launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. Putin later described the talks as “very useful.”
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Steve Holland; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Cynthia Osterman and Edmund Klamann)
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