Putin meets Trump envoy as Ukraine peace deadline looms
Vladimir Putin met American envoy Steve Witkoff on Thursday in the middle of President Donald Trump’s Friday deadline so that the Russian strong man begins to talk about peace with Ukraine.
A Kremlin spokesperson said the meeting lasted three hours and was “useful and constructive”. The spokesperson suggested that Putin presented a kind of proposal for Witkoff to transmit to Trump, but did not develop.
The White House immediately provided any report from the meeting.
Last week, Trump established a stricter deadline of “10 or 12 days” for Putin to break the war against Ukraine or to start peace negotiations and threatened “serious prices” and other economic sanctions against Russia and its economic partners if it refuses.
Moscow had so far raised the shoulders of Trump’s deadline as an empty fanfaron, noting that he had given many previous ultimatums on various questions that turned out to be toothless.
Russia thinks that it has them over the battlefield, at least in the short and medium term, which gives it few reasons to accept even a brief ceasefire.
His troops have made modest progress along the long front line in the eastern region of Ukraine and ousted the Ukrainian troops from a ribbon of a Russian border territory which they had previously seized.
Russia has also set up increasingly deadly missiles and drone attacks against Ukrainian civilian targets.
Earlier, Witkoff made a walk early in the morning in Moscow with Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president’s envoy for investment and economic cooperation, which was captured in images broadcast by a Russian news agency.
Dmitriev played a key role in three cycles of direct talks between delegations of Russia and Ukraine, as well as discussions between Russian and American officials. Negotiations have made no progress to put an end to the three -year war after the invasion of its neighbor’s Russia.
Trump recently switched to a much more severe position on Russia after seeing Putin reject his concession requests for months.
But Trump turned out to not want to adopt a firm position to defend Ukraine and stick to it, which encourages Putin to wait for the threats.
The new deadline and the threat of imposing “secondary sanctions” on the nations which buy Russian energy, such as India, China and Turkey, are particularly problematic because these economic powers have no control over the position of Russia on Ukraine.
It is unlikely that they reduce economic ties with Moscow in response to such American demands, especially when Trump himself was barely contracted a few weeks ago.
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