A big week…
On Tuesday, President Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, a White House official confirmed to NewsNation, the sister publication of The Hill.
Witkoff departed for Russia on Monday. His trip comes following negotiations between U.S. and Ukrainian officials in Florida on Sunday, with both delegations saying the talks were “productive.”
However, on Monday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back on the remarks and said there are still “some tough issues” to work through with the U.S.
The Hill reported that security guarantees for Ukraine and any territorial concessions to Russia are the hardest sticking points in Trump’s proposal to end the nearly four-year war.
President Trump on Sunday said that talks between U.S. and Ukrainian officials are “going well” and added that “I think Russia would like to see it end.”
But the president was careful to noted that he was not putting a deadline on Putin to accept the terms of a U.S. proposal.
“My deadline is when the war is over,” Trump told reporters on Sunday.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion against Ukraine in February 2022 and has held onto roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, on top of territory it seized in 2014 when it invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern territories of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk.
Ukraine’s military has succeeded in preventing a Russian takeover of the country by force and has regained territory in the northeast and south of the country in the first year of the war, but has struggled to repeat those successes as the war has dragged on.
