New round of talks has not changed the course of the Ukraine war, experts say

The order of the weekend visits by Donald Trump's envoys has become a signal in itself. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday, then traveled to Kyiv the next day for talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and representatives of Ukraine's European allies.

Yevhen Magda, director of the Kyiv-based Institute of World Politics, said the sequence could indicate that the United States gives more weight to Russia's views than to Ukraine's. Russian political analyst Yuri Svetov made the point more bluntly, saying that the envoys' first stop in Moscow showed where the most important decisions are made.

Magda said Washington was deliberately putting more pressure on Ukraine than on Russia. “Pressuring the weaker side is a classic of international politics,” he told Radio NV. Still, he said it was positive that Witkoff and Kushner had not heard anything particularly constructive in Moscow about continuing the negotiations.

Kushner said after the Kyiv meetings that he hoped the next step toward peace would be a continuation of trilateral talks between the United States, Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian military and security-policy expert Oleksandr Kovalenko described the envoys' personal visit to Kyiv as a diplomatic victory. Earlier talks between the U.S. envoys and Ukrainian politicians had all taken place outside Ukraine, he wrote on Telegram.

Magda remains doubtful that the American negotiators can help secure peace on terms Ukraine can accept. He said Ukraine would have to rely primarily on itself to defend its interests. At the same time, he argued that Putin faced a difficult choice: continuing the war would increase Russia's costs, while ending it could create serious domestic political problems for the Kremlin.

Experts said Putin did not appear to have abandoned his central demand for full control of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. That assessment drew partly on remarks by his aide Yuri Ushakov after the Kremlin meeting. Putin has justified the demand by claiming that Russian forces hold the initiative at the front. Analysts at the U.S. Institute for the Study of War said that belief did not match battlefield reality and instead reflected inaccurate reports passed to the Russian military leadership.

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Pressuring the weaker side is a classic of international politics.