Reuters : US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with President Vladimir Putin on Friday in St Petersburg about the search for a peace deal on Ukraine as Trump told Russia to “get moving”.
Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff in St Petersburg’s presidential library at the start of the negotiations. The Izvestia news outlet earlier released a video of Witkoff leaving a hotel in the city, accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy.
Witkoff has emerged as a key figure in the on-off rapprochement between Moscow and Washington amid talk on the Russian side of potential joint investments in the Arctic and in Russian rare earth minerals.
However, the talks come at a time when US-Russia dialogue aimed at agreeing a ceasefire ahead of a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine appears to have stalled over disagreements around conditions for a full pause in hostilities.
Trump, who has shown signs of losing patience, has spoken of imposing secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil if he feels Moscow is dragging its feet on a Ukrainian deal.
On Friday, he said in a post on Truth Social: “Russia has to get moving. Too many people [are] dying, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war — A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were president!!!”
Putin has said he is ready in principle to agree to a full ceasefire, but has said that many crucial conditions have yet to be agreed upon about how it would work and has said that what he calls the root causes of the war have yet to be addressed.
Specifically, he has said that Ukraine should not join Nato, that the size of its army needs to be limited and that Russia should get the entirety of the territory of the four Ukrainian regions it claims as its own despite not fully controlling any of them.
With Moscow controlling just under 20 per cent of Ukraine and Russian forces continuing to advance on the battlefield, the Kremlin believes Russia is in a strong position when it comes to negotiations and that Ukraine should make concessions.
