MOSCOW: US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with President Vladimir Putin on Friday in St. Petersburg about the search for a peace deal on Ukraine as Trump told Russia to “get moving.”
Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff in St. Petersburg’s presidential library at the start of the negotiations. The Izvestia news outlet earlier released video of Witkoff leaving a hotel in the city, accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy.
Witkoff has emerged as a key figure in the on-off rapprochement between Moscow and Washington amid talk on the Russian side of potential joint investments in the Arctic and in Russian rare earth minerals.
However, the talks come at a time when US-Russia dialogue aimed at agreeing a ceasefire ahead of a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine appears to have stalled over disagreements around conditions for a full pause in hostilities.
Trump, who has shown signs of losing patience, has spoken of imposing secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil if he feels Moscow is dragging its feet on a Ukrainian deal.
On Friday, he said in a post on Truth Social: “Russia has to get moving. Too many people (are) DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war — A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!“
Putin has said he is ready in principle to agree a full ceasefire, but has said that many crucial conditions have yet to be agreed about how it would work and has said that what he calls the root causes of the war have yet to be addressed.
Specifically, he has said that Ukraine should not join NATO, that the size of its army needs to be limited, and that Russia should get the entirety of the territory of the four Ukrainian regions it claims as its own despite not fully controlling any of them.
With Moscow controlling just under 20 percent of Ukraine and Russian forces continuing to advance on the battlefield, the Kremlin believes Russia is in a strong position when it comes to negotiations and that Ukraine should make concessions.
Kyiv says Russia’s terms would amount to a capitulation.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin and Witkoff might discuss the possibility of the Russian leader meeting Trump face-to-face.
Putin and Trump have spoken by phone but have yet to meet in person since the US leader returned to the White House in January for a second four-year term.
However, Peskov played down the Witkoff-Putin talks, telling Russian state media before they started that the US envoy’s visit would not be “momentous” and no breakthroughs were expected.
He said the meeting would be a chance for Russia to express its “concerns.” Moscow and Kyiv have repeatedly accused each other of violating a moratorium on striking each other’s energy infrastructure.
The meeting, the third this year between Putin and Witkoff, comes at a time when US tensions with Iran and China, both close allies of Moscow, have been heightened by Tehran’s nuclear program and a burgeoning trade war with Beijing.
Witkoff, who visited a synagogue in St. Petersburg earlier on Friday, is due in Oman on Saturday for talks with Iran over its nuclear program. Trump has threatened Tehran with military action if it does not agree to a deal. Moscow has repeatedly offered its help in trying to clinch a diplomatic settlement.
US and Russian officials said they had made progress during talks in Istanbul on Thursday toward normalizing the work of their diplomatic missions as they begin to rebuild ties.
A February meeting between Witkoff and Putin culminated with the US envoy flying home with Marc Fogel, an American teacher whom Washington had said was wrongfully detained by Russia.
A Russian-American spa worker Ksenia Karelina, who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison in Russia, was exchanged on Thursday for Arthur Petrov, whom the US had accused of forming a global smuggling ring to transfer sensitive electronics to Russia’s military.