Trump administration envoys arrived on Saturday in Moscow, Russian state news agencies reported, in an effort to restart talks to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, over six months after a previous round of discussions fizzled out.
The trip by Steve Witkoff, the administration’s peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, came even as Russian and Ukrainian forces are locked in an escalating spiral of airstrikes.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday that U.S. envoys would “have a meeting in Moscow and another one in Kyiv,” Ukraine’s capital. He added: “It is important that America remain actively engaged. We are ready to meet with them in Ukraine — properly and substantively.”
Kyrylo Budanov, the Ukrainian delegation’s leader at the previous talks, told The New York Times in a recent interview that negotiations mediated by the Trump administration were expected to begin by late September, days after Russia’s parliamentary election and weeks before U.S. midterm elections.
It is not clear whether a new round of talks will yield more progress than previous ones. But “negotiations will sooner or later come to something,” Mr. Budanov told The Times. “You cannot fight your whole life.”
Here is what to know about peace talks and where they stand.
When was the last round of negotiations?
Russia and Ukraine have been talking at various levels since February 2022, when Russian forces mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory. Despite brief cease-fires and occasional prisoner swaps, the two sides have made little headway toward ending the war.
A new flurry of high-level, U.S.-brokered negotiations began shortly after Mr. Trump — who claimed he could end the war in a day — took office in January 2025.
The last round of face-to-face talks was held in February, when Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, and then later in Geneva. But there was no breakthrough in those discussions, and they ground to a halt after the United States and Israel went to war against Iran, a conflict that has consumed the Trump administration’s attention.
Since then, there have been limited contacts between Moscow and Kyiv, but the major issues have remained on hold.
In June, Mr. Zelensky published an open letter to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that offered to resume peace talks, but that also taunted the Russian leader. Mr. Putin, who has shown little serious interest in peace negotiations, recently pledged to pursue the war.
What are the main sticking points?
The last round of negotiations focused a 20-point peace plan that covered a broad range of issues, including security guarantees that Ukraine seeks to prevent future Russian aggression, and commitments to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.
Russia has demanded that Ukraine hand over the land it controls in the eastern Donetsk region as a condition for ending the war, a strip of territory about 50 miles long and 40 miles wide that includes dozens of towns and villages. Ukraine has refused to withdraw unilaterally, arguing that ceding land would embolden Russia to attack again, and it has asked for guarantees that would deter Moscow from violating any cease-fire.
Who is involved?
The United States has been the main mediator in talks between Russia and Ukraine.
But European leaders — nervous that Mr. Trump will cut them out of any settlement — are trying to take a more active role in ending the war, whose outcome could shape the continent’s security for decades to come. Mr. Trump has also made it clear that he sees Ukraine as a European responsibility.
European diplomats are working on a format for future negotiations to protect European interests that would be led by France, Germany and Britain, European officials said last month.
What is the situation on the ground?
The front, stretching hundreds of miles through eastern Ukraine, has largely been frozen. The terrain has been devastated, a killing field dominated by drones, making troop movement a lethal risk.
As a result, Russia and Ukraine have instead intensified a campaign of airstrikes that have caused death and destruction in cities far from the battlefield. Over the summer, the two sides have launched drones and missiles at energy infrastructure, commercial warehouses and ports that are crucial to grain exports.
Russia has pummeled Kyiv with unrelenting daytime attacks of new jet-powered drones, taking advantage of a Ukrainian shortage of air defenses. Ukraine has launched attacks increasingly deep into Russia’s territory, disrupting its economy and isolating Crimea.
Even if negotiations resume this month, conditions for a cease-fire are unlikely to come until spring, Mr. Budanov told The Times. Russia is expected to attempt to break Ukraine in another strategic winter bombing campaign, the fourth of the war.
More than two million Russian and Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded in the four years that Russia has been waging war against its neighbor, according to one study.
