The Diplomats Return: Can Kushner and Witkoff End the War in Ukraine?

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 5 September 2026

There is something faintly surreal about the sight of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff returning to Moscow in September 2026, four and a half years after Russia began her full-scale invasion of Ukraine, carrying yet another American proposal for peace. The war has outlasted innumerable predictions of its conclusion. It has survived sanctions packages, mobilisation, mutiny, counter-offensives, American elections, European elections, diplomatic initiatives, changes of government and an extraordinary revolution in the technologies of warfare. Now the two businessmen-diplomats upon whom President Donald Trump has placed an unusual degree of confidence have arrived in Moscow and, assuming their itinerary proceeds as planned, will travel onwards to Kyiv.

This is not quite another diplomatic meeting of the sort to which we have become accustomed. There are reasons to believe that something may emerge from it. But there are equally powerful reasons to suppose that whatever emerges will not be peace — at least not yet.

The distinction matters. Trump said on 4 September that Witkoff and Kushner were carrying what he described as an “idea for peace”. The contents have not been published. Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Moscow the following day and were received by Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s increasingly important intermediary with Washington. They are then expected in Kyiv on Sunday. The sequence is deliberate: listen to Moscow, carry whatever Putin says to Kyiv and determine whether there remains sufficient overlap between the positions of the two belligerents for another round of diplomacy.

That sounds straightforward. It is anything but.

The problem that diplomacy cannot disguise

At the centre of the war remains a disagreement that cannot readily be expressed in diplomatic language because it is brutally simple. Russia wants territory that Ukraine does not wish to surrender.

The Kremlin has just reiterated that Vladimir Putin’s position is “unshakeable”: Ukraine must relinquish the entirety of the four Ukrainian regions Russia claims to have annexed and must abandon her ambition of joining NATO. This would require Kyiv not merely to accept Russian occupation of territory currently held by Russian forces, but potentially to withdraw voluntarily from Ukrainian territory that Russia has been unable to conquer militarily. Kyiv regards such a settlement as surrender, and understandably so.

This is the central fact against which every peace initiative eventually collides.

Much of the remainder of a settlement can probably be negotiated. Prisoner exchanges can be agreed. The operation of the Black Sea can be regulated. Nuclear installations can be dealt with by elaborate international arrangements. Sanctions can be phased out or suspended according to compliance. Russian assets can be argued about endlessly. Security guarantees for Ukraine can be constructed in various ingenious forms falling somewhere between NATO membership and the Budapest Memorandum. Limits upon particular categories of weapons might conceivably be negotiated.

But a village cannot simultaneously be Russian and Ukrainian. Territorial sovereignty is peculiarly resistant to diplomatic ambiguity. At some point somebody must administer the police station, collect the taxes, issue the passports and decide which flag flies above the town hall.

That is why previous negotiations have repeatedly approached agreement on a large number of subsidiary questions while failing upon the principal one. Earlier American diplomacy reportedly produced a framework in which much of a possible settlement had been agreed, while territorial questions remained unresolved. The February rounds of US-mediated negotiations similarly failed to achieve a breakthrough.

The difficulty facing Kushner and Witkoff is therefore not principally one of diplomatic technique. It is that neither Moscow nor Kyiv has yet concluded that its alternative to compromise — continuing the war — is worse than the concessions required for peace. Until that calculation changes, diplomacy has severe limits.

Putin’s calculation

The most important person in these negotiations is therefore not Witkoff, Kushner, Trump or Zelensky. It is Vladimir Putin. Putin has recently spoken with characteristic contradiction. On the one hand he has suggested that there is a chance for an agreement. On the other he declared only days ago that Russia is winning, that the Ukrainian leadership consists of “terrorists” and that he has no doubt his enemy will eventually crumble.

One should not become excessively distracted by Russian rhetoric. Governments negotiating wars routinely declare themselves victorious immediately before making compromises. The more significant question is whether Putin believes what his military commanders are apparently telling him — that further fighting will materially improve Russia’s negotiating position.

There are indications that he does. A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Putin remains intent upon taking more territory and believes Russia can secure the remainder of Donetsk region. Western military analysts reportedly regard the proposed timetable as unrealistic because Russian advances remain slow. But the accuracy of the forecast is almost beside the point. If Putin himself believes that another three or six months of warfare will leave him holding more territory, then the rational moment for him to compromise is three or six months from now, not today.

This is perhaps the greatest obstacle confronting the Americans. Wars tend to end not when one side is tired — both sides in this war are tired — but when the principal decision-makers conclude that time is no longer improving their position. It is not clear that Putin has reached that conclusion.

Yet Russia is hurting

Nevertheless the Russian position is considerably less comfortable than Kremlin rhetoric suggests. Ukraine has developed an increasingly formidable campaign against Russia’s economic infrastructure. Oil refineries, terminals, logistics facilities and other installations far behind the front have become vulnerable to Ukrainian long-range drones. The resulting disruption has contributed to fuel shortages and rising prices within Russia. Putin himself has acknowledged that Ukrainian attacks are inflicting real damage and that drones constitute a serious problem.

This matters because the war has undergone an important transformation. For much of its duration Putin succeeded in insulating ordinary Russians — particularly those in Moscow and St Petersburg — from its immediate physical consequences. The war happened somewhere else. Soldiers were recruited disproportionately from poorer regions. Oil revenues continued. Restaurants remained open. Moscow prospered behind an increasingly strange curtain of normality.

Long-range Ukrainian drones have begun to perforate that curtain. They cannot defeat Russia by themselves. But they alter the political economy of waiting. Every refinery disrupted, every airport closed and every interruption in the Russian distribution system imposes another small cost upon continuing the war. This is precisely the sort of pressure that can eventually make diplomacy productive.

Ukraine has her own reasons to negotiate

Ukraine is hurting too — terribly. Russian missile and drone attacks upon Ukrainian cities have intensified. Kyiv has endured repeated waves of bombardment, and on 4 September a Russian drone struck the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, in the centre of the capital. The attack came immediately before the American diplomatic mission and after days of sustained attacks upon Kyiv.

Ukraine also faces the perennial problem of air-defence ammunition. Russia possesses an enormous capacity to manufacture relatively inexpensive attack drones while Western interceptor missiles remain costly, scarce and slow to manufacture. Hence both sides possess instruments capable of hurting the other while neither possesses an obvious instrument capable of producing decisive victory. That is the classic environment in which negotiations eventually become serious. But “eventually” is doing considerable work in that sentence.

Why Kushner and Witkoff matter

There has been criticism of the unconventional diplomatic status of both men, and some of it is understandable. Neither represents the traditional model of American professional diplomacy. Witkoff is a property developer turned presidential envoy. Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser.

Yet this may be less of a disadvantage than it appears. Diplomacy with highly personalised regimes frequently depends less upon formal institutional status than upon perceived access to the ultimate decision-maker. Putin does not need another American official capable of explaining the State Department’s position. He needs interlocutors whom he believes can telephone Donald Trump and obtain an answer. Witkoff and Kushner have precisely that quality.

Their previous negotiations have not ended the war — far from it — but they have created direct channels to Putin’s circle, particularly through Dmitriev. Witkoff has met Putin repeatedly. Kushner brings the additional advantage that nobody in Moscow can seriously doubt his access to the American President.

The Trump administration’s diplomatic method is therefore essentially transactional. It seeks to identify what each participant wants, determine what Washington can supply or withhold and construct a bargain. This approach can appear crude. Sometimes crude diplomacy works. The difficulty arises when the things the parties want are mutually exclusive.

What can Trump actually trade?

This brings us to the real significance of the current mission. Washington possesses things Moscow wants. Russia wants sanctions relief. She wants restored access to international capital and technology. She wants greater international legitimacy. She wants economic relations with the United States. She wants restrictions upon Ukraine’s military capabilities. Above all, Moscow wants Washington gradually to cease treating Russia as a strategic pariah.

Washington can negotiate about many of these things. It also possesses things Kyiv wants — military equipment, intelligence, financial support, air defence and above all some credible mechanism by which a peace agreement does not merely become an interval during which Russia reconstitutes her armed forces before invading again.

The American negotiating strategy is therefore potentially powerful because Washington sits between two states that each need something only Washington can realistically provide. But there is an asymmetry. America can offer Russia sanctions relief. She cannot legitimately give Russia Ukrainian territory. America can offer Ukraine security assistance. She cannot indefinitely compel Ukrainians to regard the voluntary surrender of Ukrainian cities as an acceptable price for peace. This is where Trump’s deal-making instincts confront the ancient limitations of great-power diplomacy. Other people’s countries are difficult assets to trade.

The significance of going to Kyiv

The Kyiv leg of this journey may therefore prove more important than it initially appears.

Witkoff and Kushner have visited Moscow repeatedly, but this is expected to be their first visit to Kyiv in these roles. That matters psychologically and politically. American mediation has periodically suffered from a Ukrainian suspicion that Washington hears Russian arguments directly from Putin and his entourage and subsequently presents them to Kyiv as unavoidable realities.

Travelling physically from Moscow to Kyiv changes that dynamic, if only modestly. The Americans will encounter a country upon which Russia is still dropping drones and missiles. They will hear Ukrainian assessments directly. They will be confronted with the political impossibility for any Ukrainian government of simply signing away substantial parts of the country without extremely powerful compensating guarantees.

Zelensky has approached the visit carefully. He has publicly said Ukraine wants substantive negotiations and agreed to refrain from air strikes during the Americans’ visit to Russia, while asking Moscow to reciprocate during their visit to Ukraine. That is sensible diplomacy. Ukraine’s interest is not to appear the obstacle to peace. Indeed this may now be Kyiv’s most important diplomatic task: to remain visibly more reasonable than Moscow.

What would count as success?

The mistake would be to judge this weekend solely by whether Kushner and Witkoff return carrying a peace treaty. They almost certainly will not. A genuinely tangible result might be considerably smaller.

The first possibility is a renewed negotiating timetable. The American-mediated process effectively stalled after February. Simply restoring regular negotiations between Russian, Ukrainian and American representatives would represent progress. The second would be a limited ceasefire concerning long-range attacks against particular categories of targets — energy infrastructure, major cities, ports or perhaps airports. The curious negotiations surrounding the envoys’ own safety have already demonstrated that both sides can contemplate temporary restraints upon strikes. Turning a forty-eight-hour diplomatic courtesy into a thirty-day experiment would not end the war, but it would be something real.

A third possibility would be agreement upon the architecture of a settlement while postponing the territorial question. This might include security guarantees, sanctions sequencing, reconstruction, prisoner exchanges and mechanisms for monitoring a ceasefire.

The fourth — and most consequential — would be agreement upon a ceasefire roughly along the existing line of contact without requiring either party immediately to recognise the other’s sovereignty claims. That is probably the only conceptual bridge presently available across the territorial chasm. Ukraine need not recognise Russian sovereignty over occupied territory. Russia need not formally abandon her claims. Fighting stops where the armies happen to stand. The sovereignty dispute is deferred. It would be untidy, legally unsatisfactory and politically painful. Many successful armistices are.

The Korean possibility

The increasingly plausible model for Ukraine may therefore not be a comprehensive peace treaty at all. It may be Korea.

The Korean War did not conclude with a grand reconciliation resolving every constitutional and territorial dispute. It concluded with an armistice because continued fighting had become sufficiently unattractive to everyone involved. The underlying political dispute survived.

Something similar could eventually happen in Ukraine. The front could be frozen under international monitoring. Neither side would recognise the other’s territorial claims. Ukraine could receive extensive security guarantees and continue integrating economically with Europe. Russia could receive conditional sanctions relief. More ambitious political questions could be left to future generations. This would offend everyone who believes wars ought to conclude tidily. History rarely displays such good manners.

Why this weekend probably will not produce it

Yet even this limited outcome probably remains premature. Russia’s behaviour immediately before the talks is hardly suggestive of a government preparing its population for compromise. Moscow has intensified attacks. The Kremlin has reiterated its territorial demands. Putin continues publicly to profess confidence in eventual military success. Ukrainian officials meanwhile reportedly believe Russia may be preparing further escalation.

There is also the coming winter. This is particularly important. Some Ukrainian officials reportedly believe Moscow intends to use the winter to inflict further damage upon Ukraine’s energy system in the hope of weakening Kyiv’s negotiating position before spring. If that assessment is correct, then Putin’s present objective in negotiations may be less to conclude an agreement than to discover the American position, identify potential concessions, discourage further American pressure and keep diplomatic channels open while Russia continues fighting.

That is an old negotiating technique. One negotiates because negotiations themselves have value.

The American lever

The decisive question will therefore arise after Witkoff and Kushner return. Suppose Moscow rejects the American proposal or demands terms Kyiv cannot conceivably accept. What then? If the answer is merely another meeting, then Putin has little reason to compromise. If the answer is intensified economic pressure, greater restrictions upon Russian energy revenues, expanded Ukrainian long-range strike capacity and accelerated provision of air defence, then the calculation changes.

Conversely Washington must persuade Kyiv that serious compromise will bring durable American guarantees rather than abandonment. Diplomacy succeeds when the consequences of saying no become sufficiently unattractive and the consequences of saying yes become sufficiently credible. Witkoff and Kushner can carry proposals. Only Trump can supply that equation.

A narrow window

There is nevertheless a reason for guarded optimism. For perhaps the first time in some months, all three capitals appear interested in discovering whether a bargain exists. Trump plainly wants one. Zelensky plainly wants an end to the war upon terms his country can survive. Even Putin, while maintaining maximalist rhetoric, continues receiving American emissaries and has said there is a chance of agreement.

That does not mean their preferred agreements resemble one another. But wars sometimes end through an accumulation of diplomatic encounters that appear fruitless at the time. Positions are mapped. Impossible demands are identified. Face-saving formulae are invented. Private assurances replace public rhetoric. Eventually some external shock — military, economic or political — causes proposals previously rejected as unacceptable suddenly to appear preferable to the alternative.

Kushner and Witkoff may therefore not be travelling to Moscow and Kyiv to conclude the peace. They may be travelling to discover how far away it remains. That information itself has value. The most plausible result of this weekend is consequently neither triumph nor failure. There may be no dramatic handshake, no ceasefire announced from the White House and certainly no comprehensive treaty resolving the future of Crimea and the Donbas.

But there may be something smaller and ultimately more important: the restoration of an active negotiating channel, the identification of the remaining irreducible disputes and perhaps the beginnings of a limited arrangement restraining the increasingly destructive long-range air war.

If that happens, it should not be dismissed. The war in Ukraine is unlikely to end because two American envoys discover an ingenious sentence nobody had previously thought to write. It will end when Moscow and Kyiv — and the powers supporting them — finally decide that the uncertain compromises of peace are preferable to another season of killing. We are probably not there yet. But Kushner and Witkoff’s journey may tell us whether we are getting closer.