United States President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg to discuss the war in Ukraine.
Trump has been pressing Moscow and Kyiv to agree on a ceasefire deal but has failed to extract any major concessions from the Kremlin, despite several rounds of talks between Russian and US officials.
On Friday, Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff in Saint Petersburg’s presidential library at the start of the negotiations, and state news agencies later said their talks lasted more than four hours.
The Kremlin said the meeting “focused on various aspects of the Ukrainian settlement”, without elaborating.
Earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had 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.
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.
The Izvestia news outlet earlier released a video of him leaving a hotel in the city, accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy.
Dmitriev also called the talks on Friday productive, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
Trump urges Russia to ‘get moving’
The talks come as US efforts to secure a ceasefire deal to end the Ukraine war have stalled amid negotiations on the conditions to end the conflict.
Last month, Putin rejected a joint US-Ukrainian proposal for a complete and unconditional ceasefire.
While Russia and Ukraine agreed to halt attacks on energy infrastructure in March, both sides have accused each other of continuing attacks.
At the end of March, Trump said he was “very angry” and “p****d off” after Putin criticised the credibility of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s leadership.
In an interview with NBC News, Trump also threatened tariffs on Russian oil “if Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault”.
On Friday morning, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that “Russia has to get moving.
“Too many people ere [sic] 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!!!” he said.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from the Russian capital Moscow, correspondent Yulia Shapovalova said the dialogue between Washington and Moscow continues.
“Peskov admitted that the settlement itself was a very complicated issue. But still, he said the meeting was a good opportunity for Russia to make its position heard,” she said.
“The message from the US president to Russia, brought by Steve Witkoff, is quite clear: It’s a ceasefire in Ukraine,” Shapovalova said.
“But analysts believe that Putin is not quite interested in showing Russia’s readiness for a ceasefire as Russia slowly but steadily is moving forward on the Ukrainian fronts.”
She added that Russia’s demands also remain unchanged.
It is opposed to the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), wants a reduced US presence in Europe, and has called for security guarantees and noninterference in its internal affairs.
“Having said that, we can see now that oil prices are going down on the market, which may mean that Russia won’t be able to wage this war in the long run,” Shapovalova said.
Mending ties
US and Russian officials also held talks on Thursday in Turkiye.
Both sides said they had made progress towards normalising the work of their diplomatic missions.
That same day, Russia freed Russian American Ksenia Karelina from prison in exchange for the suspected tech smuggler Arthur Petrov.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the prisoner exchanges helped build “trust, which is much needed” between the two sides after ties deteriorated under Biden.
