MIAMI, United States: President Donald Trump’s envoys were to meet Ukrainian negotiators on Thursday for the third time in two weeks to press his plan to end the war as his administration eased economic pressure on Russia.
Two days after the envoys met Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Treasury Department partially suspended measures that Trump had announced in October when he vowed to get tough on Moscow.
The Treasury Department suspended until at least April 29 economic sanctions against Lukoil-branded gas stations outside of Russia.
A ban remains in place to prevent the money from flowing back to Russia, which has been under sweeping US and EU sanctions since the Ukraine war started in February 2022.
Easing isolation
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s global ambassador, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, will meet in the Miami area for dinner late Thursday with the top Ukrainian negotiator, Rustem Umerov, a US official said.
The gathering, which will be closed to the press, came two days after the Trump duo met with Putin for five hours, stretching into the early morning, in Moscow.
Trump said the envoys had a “reasonably good meeting” with Putin.
Pressed on whether Witkoff and Kushner got any sense that Putin genuinely wanted to halt the Ukraine war, Trump replied: “He would like to end the war. That was their impression.”
But Putin showed no public signs of budging. “This is a complex task and a challenging mission that President Trump took upon himself,” Putin said of the diplomacy in an interview as he visited India.
“Achieving consensus among competing parties is no easy task, but President Trump, truly, I believe — he sincerely tries to do this,” he said, according to the magazine India Today.
“I think we should engage with this effort rather than obstruct it.”
Trump in August welcomed Putin to Alaska, where they made no clear progress on ending the Ukraine conflict.
Critical time for Ukraine
Trump has previously mused that Russia will inevitably win more land and that Ukraine would be better off settling.
Witkoff and Kushner have been working on modifications since meeting with the Ukrainians on November 23 in Geneva. The two sides met again the following week in Miami alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The talks come at a delicate time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was hailed as a hero in the West at the start of the war but has had a tumultuous relationship with Trump.
Zelensky last week removed his top aide and negotiator, Andriy Yermak, who days earlier had negotiated with Witkoff, as he came under investigation in a corruption scandal.
