President Donald Trump’s trusted foreign envoy Steve Witkoff is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, after the Kremlin requested that Witkoff visit in a last-ditch effort to avoid the punishing new sanctions Trump has threatened to impose this week, people familiar with the matter said.
Witkoff landed in Moscow on Wednesday morning and was greeted at the airport by Russia’s investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev, Reuters reported. Video later posted by the Kremlin showed him shaking hands with Putin ahead of their meeting.
Whether Putin can convince Witkoff — and, by extension, Trump — that he is interested in ending Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine is an open question. Trump has cast doubt on Putin’s willingness to stop the fighting and appears wary of being strung along by a leader he now openly distrusts.
Putin, meanwhile, has maintained his maximalist ambitions for the conflict, including capturing the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and insisting Ukraine limit the size of its military.
Trump said a day ahead of Witkoff’s meeting he would wait until the talks conclude to decide whether to impose the new sanctions.
“We’re going to see what happens,” he said at the White House. “We’ll make that determination at that time.”
When asked by a reporter after arriving in Russia, Witkoff did not share his expectations ahead of the talks, Russian state media TASS said.
The environment in Moscow will be far different than the last time Witkoff sat down with Putin in April — with Trump’s frustration toward his Russian counterpart mounting in recent months. Since the April meeting, Russia has resisted US-led efforts to broker a peace in Ukraine, ramping up an onslaught of missiles and drones that have targeted Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv.
A day ahead of Witkoff’s visit, Trump spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss potential sanctions on Moscow, according to people familiar with the conversation. In a readout of the meeting posted on social media, Zelensky said those sanctions could “change a lot” when it comes to the Russian economy.
Zelensky also said they discussed the increase of American weapons support to Ukraine, paid for by NATO allies, a policy Trump green-lit last month.
The US president has grown increasingly impatient at Russia’s resistance to his peace efforts, calling the air attacks “disgusting” and accusing Putin of peddling “bullsh*t” in their tense phone conversations.
He has set a Friday deadline for Russia to either agree to a peace deal or suffer new sanctions, including on its own economy and on purchasers of its energy products. Trump truncated his original 50-day timeline after seeing little movement from Russia. Yet he has also cast doubt that any new sanctions will prove effective after Moscow found ways to skirt the heaps of western measures applied since the war began.
“There’ll be sanctions, but they seem to be pretty good at avoiding sanctions,” Trump said Sunday. “You know, they’re wily characters, and they’re pretty good at avoiding sanctions. So we’ll see what happens.”
Trump also announced late last week that he was ordering the repositioning of two US nuclear submarines in an effort to be “prepared” – a response to inflammatory remarks by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and current deputy chairman of its security council.
