U.S. Peace Envoys Go to Kyiv After Meeting Putin in Moscow
Two U.S. officials sent by President Donald Trump — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — arrived in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sunday, September 6, 2026, to try to move peace talks forward, according to NPR. Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. The visit came one day after the two men met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow for more than three hours. Trump had announced the trip earlier in the week, Reuters reported.
The Moscow meeting ended without any announced breakthroughs. Putin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov called the talks constructive, frank, and useful but did not share specific results. Ushakov said the conversation was not only about the war in Ukraine. He said the two sides also discussed economic issues and possible joint projects that could benefit both Russia and the United States.
The envoys traveled to Moscow and Kyiv to revive a stalled peace effort in the Russia-Ukraine war, AP reported. The New York Times reported on September 4 that the envoys planned to visit both cities that weekend to restart peace discussions. Reuters, citing the Russian news agency TASS, also reported the planned visits on September 4.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Witkoff and Kushner would attend part of the talks between Kyiv and Moscow as part of the U.S. strategy in Ukraine. Rubio called Witkoff one of the country's best negotiators on the conflict. The Kremlin said on June 24, 2026, that it expected contacts with the United States over Ukraine to resume once Witkoff and Kushner were available.
Before this trip, the last known visit to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner was in January 2026, when they also met with Putin. The U.S. push to end the fighting in Ukraine had slowed down over the previous six months because the United States had been focused on the Iran war.
Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed to stop attacking each other's capital cities while peace talks were underway. Despite that agreement, Russia and Ukraine traded attacks overnight into Sunday, officials said. Russian attacks across several Ukrainian regions killed one person and injured at least 10 others overnight into Sunday, according to Ukraine's State Emergency Service. In Zaporizhzhia, drone strikes killed a 74-year-old man and wounded three people. A drone hit an apartment building in the Khmelnytskyi region, injuring seven people.
Ukraine's Air Force said on Sunday that it intercepted 82 of 108 drones launched by Russia overnight, along with six missiles. In Russia, a man was killed and a woman was seriously wounded when a Ukrainian drone hit a vehicle in the Belgorod border region. The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defenses shot down 258 Ukrainian drones overnight across 14 Russian regions, occupied Crimea, and the Black and Azov seas.
The broader context here is that U.S. attention to the Ukraine peace effort has faded over the past six months as the Iran war took priority. The overnight attacks, which killed civilians in both Ukraine and Russia, show how fragile the agreement to pause strikes on each other's capitals really was. Both sides kept fighting in front-line and border areas even as the U.S. envoys were in the air, pointing to the gap between the peace talks and what is happening on the battlefield.
Ushakov's mention of economic issues and joint U.S.-Russia projects in the Moscow talks adds another layer to the diplomacy. Whether those discussions will help or hinder the peace effort is an open question for officials following the process.
