Axios: President Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will travel this weekend to Moscow and Kyiv for talks on ending the war, U.S. officials said.
The U.S. envoy mission billed as a two-capital shuttle between Moscow and Kyiv is coming apart before it starts. Russian state agency TASS reported Thursday that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would visit Moscow on Saturday and Kyiv on Sunday — but within hours, the Kyiv Independent reported that Witkoff has grown "too scared" to make the Kyiv trip, that Russian interlocutors are actively discouraging it, and that the visit remains "under discussion."
The Kremlin has not confirmed the itinerary. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, "I will not announce anything — we will inform you once contacts take place." The White House has offered no confirmation either. What is emerging instead is a familiar architecture: Moscow shaping the terms of a diplomatic process it has not formally acknowledged exists.
The fracture is the story
A source familiar with the matter told the Kyiv Independent: "The Russians don't want them to come here to Kyiv, and Witkoff is always sensitive to Russian sentiment. They're being told there that it's dangerous." Kyiv's airspace remains closed, complicating any flight to Boryspil, and Witkoff has reportedly resisted travel by train — the method other Western officials have used routinely.
The White House asked Russia not to strike Kyiv during the envoys' visit. According to a person familiar with the request, "Russia did not commit." Asked whether Moscow would negotiate security arrangements for the Kyiv leg, Peskov was blunt: "No, there won't be." Zelenskyy, for his part, said Wednesday he is "ready to meet with them in Ukraine," calling continued U.S. engagement "very important" — a readiness that sits awkwardly against Moscow's evident reluctance to permit it, a dynamic Washington previously linked security guarantees to Ukrainian territorial concessions in ways that already tilted leverage toward the Kremlin.
Observers are reading: What Moscow's preconditions reveal about who is actually designing the shuttle's itinerary.
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No confirmation, no ceasefire, no clarity
Putin told the Eastern Economic Forum Wednesday there is "a chance" for peace, while branding Ukrainian strikes "acts of terrorism." Trump, in a GB News interview aired the same day, said simply: "I just want to see that end. I think we'll get it." Neither statement resolves whether Witkoff reaches Kyiv this weekend. What is confirmed is Thursday morning's drone barrage on the Ukrainian capital and at least three deaths nationwide overnight — the hard power underwriting Moscow's soft-power leverage over a mission still without a confirmed itinerary.
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