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World - Russia-Ukraine War

Putin Gave Trump's Envoys Three Hours in the Kremlin. Tomorrow, for the First Time, They Land in Kyiv

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner walked out of the Kremlin Saturday evening after a three-hour sit-down with Vladimir Putin, carrying whatever comes next to Kyiv on Sunday — a city that, hours earlier, had two of its airports hit by the same missiles this trip is supposed to help stop.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

MOSCOW & KYIV · SEP 4–5, 2026 ~7 MIN READ

Updated on September 8, 2026 · Editorial update: source review, context and clarity.

There's a specific kind of whiplash that this war produces, and Saturday delivered a textbook case of it. In the morning, air raid sirens sent residents of Kyiv back into shelters as Russian missiles struck the area around two airports serving the capital, including Boryspil, the country's main international gateway before 2022. By the afternoon, Vladimir Putin was shaking Jared Kushner's hand in a gilded hall of the Kremlin's Senate Palace, and the Kremlin was telling Russian state media that no strikes on Kyiv would be carried out for the next three days. Both things happened because of the same trip. Neither one makes much sense without the other.

At a Glance

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner walked out of the Kremlin Saturday evening after a three-hour sit-down with Vladimir Putin, carrying whatever comes next to Kyiv on Sunday.
A city that, hours earlier, had two of its airports hit by the same missiles this trip is supposed to help stop.
There's a specific kind of whiplash that this war produces, and Saturday delivered a textbook case of it.

The visit nobody had actually managed before

Steve Witkoff, President Trump's special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, have been Washington's designated Ukraine-Russia peace duo for most of this year, and they've had one real audience with Putin before this: a five-hour meeting in Moscow last December that a Russian official called "constructive" and that produced, in the end, nothing anyone could point to. What makes this weekend different on paper is simple — they have never been to Kyiv. Not once, in a war Trump campaigned on ending. Zelenskyy said Saturday he expects them Sunday, calling it "our first substantive conversation" with the envoys on Ukrainian soil, and told reporters his goal was to make the talks "as constructive and substantive as possible," adding, "we need to look for real options for how to move this war toward an end."

Why now, and why it stalled before

It's worth remembering why this push went quiet in the first place. Trump told CBS News back in September 2025 that "something is going to happen" on a peace deal, but that neither side was "ready yet." Then, in February 2026, the United States launched its own war against Iran, and the Ukraine file — along with Witkoff and Kushner's attention — got shoved to the back burner for six months while Washington managed a separate Middle East conflict that is, as of this weekend, still going: the U.S. sank three Iranian oil tankers on Saturday, the same day the envoys sat down with Putin. Trump told reporters Friday he'd sent Witkoff and Kushner "with a proposal to end the conflict" in Ukraine, calling them "two great negotiators" who had "done a great job," and said "there may be a good chance that we'll do it." What the new proposal actually contains hasn't been made public, and it's genuinely unclear whether it differs in substance from earlier offers — Putin has recently reaffirmed that his territorial demands in eastern Ukraine haven't changed, and those remain flatly unacceptable to Kyiv.

A drone strike on Kyiv's own spy agency, then a pause

The backdrop to all of this is a war that escalated, not cooled, in the days right before the envoys landed. On Thursday, a Russian drone hit the headquarters of Ukraine's SBU security service in central Kyiv — Zelenskyy said it was aimed specifically at the office of the agency's acting chief, and it was the first strike on SBU headquarters since the 2022 invasion began. Then came Saturday morning's strikes near Boryspil and a second Kyiv-area airport, which Zelenskyy read as a message. "Evidently, these Russian strikes on airports are a reaction to discussions and preparations regarding the possibility of the American side using an aircraft to arrive in Ukraine," he said — since Russia's invasion, foreign leaders reaching Kyiv have had to come in overland by rail from Poland, and a strike so close to the airports so soon before a possible American flight in was hard to read as coincidence. Hours later, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Tass news agency that Putin had personally ordered a stop to strikes on Kyiv — not the rest of Ukraine, just the capital — starting at midnight Saturday and lasting three days. "This is connected with the preparation for and conduct of the Americans' contacts in Kyiv," Peskov said. Zelenskyy matched it from his side, pledging Ukraine would not strike Moscow with drones or missiles during the envoys' visit and urging Russia to extend the same restraint elsewhere.

"Evidently, these Russian strikes on airports are a reaction to discussions and preparations regarding the possibility of the American side using an aircraft to arrive in Ukraine."— Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian president, September 5, 2026

Inside the Kremlin: three hours, warm words, no new ideas confirmed

Witkoff and Kushner landed at Moscow's Vnukovo airport Saturday and were met on the tarmac by Kirill Dmitriev, Putin's envoy for investment and economic ties, who has become the Kremlin's informal welcoming committee for American visitors and posted photos of the arrival captioned "Welcome to Moscow Peacemakers." Before the meeting began, Putin passed along, on camera, his "best wishes and words of gratitude" to Trump, and described the situation the two sides would have to work through as "difficult." The talks themselves, held inside the Kremlin's Senate Palace, ran roughly three hours. Afterward, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov called the discussion "substantive, constructive, exceptionally candid, and conducted in a spirit of trust," and said Putin had given the Americans "clear and comprehensive assessments of the situation developing during the special military operation" — the Kremlin's standing euphemism for the war. Peskov, separately, was more guarded, telling Tass there was "no talk of new ideas" in the meeting itself, even as he confirmed that Witkoff and Kushner would carry Putin's "observations and assessments" with them to Kyiv on Sunday. Dmitriev's own sign-off, posted after the delegation headed for its plane, read simply: "important peacemaking visit."

What Kyiv is walking into

Ukrainian officials have been careful not to promise anything. Andrii Sybiha, the foreign minister, has spoken in recent days of a possible "new dynamic" in the diplomacy without detailing what that means, and Ukraine's military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said this week that he doesn't expect real conditions for a ceasefire to exist before spring 2027 — a timeline that, if he's right, makes Sunday's Kyiv meeting a data point in a much longer process rather than a breakthrough moment. Zelenskyy's own framing has stayed close to that same caution: hopeful enough to clear a three-day runway of quiet over his own capital, careful enough not to call it peace. What happens Sunday, when Witkoff and Kushner sit across from Ukrainian officials for the first time in a war that has now run more than four and a half years, is the only part of this weekend that hasn't been scripted by either government yet.

Parts of this account draw on additional coverage from Euromaidan Press, ABC News, and CBS News.

Commentary: Gustavo Henrique

Everyone involved here is being careful with their language, and I think that carefulness is itself the most honest signal in the story. Zelenskyy isn't calling this a breakthrough. Peskov is actively denying there were "new ideas" on the table. Budanov, Ukraine's own intelligence chief, is telling his own government not to expect a ceasefire before 2027. When the people closest to a negotiation are the ones lowering expectations the hardest, that's usually not spin — it's them managing what they've learned the hard way, after a December meeting that also ran hours and also went nowhere. What I'd actually watch is the three-day pause on Kyiv. It's small, it's geographically narrow, and Russia chose it specifically so an American plane could land safely — which tells you Moscow wanted this visit to happen more than it wanted to make a broader gesture. If Sunday's Kyiv meeting produces even a short extension of that pause, or a second one somewhere else, that's worth taking seriously. If the strikes on Kyiv simply resume at hour 73, then this weekend was a security arrangement dressed up as diplomacy, and Budanov's spring 2027 timeline was the most useful sentence anyone said all week.

REPORTING & VERIFICATION

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