Ukraine and Russia have said talks with the United States on peace proposals will continue after discussions in the Kremlin ended without a breakthrough, as the European Commission vowed to push on with plans to use Moscow’s frozen assets to fund Ukraine.
Russian president Vladimir Putin and two senior aides met US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner for five hours on Tuesday evening, but Moscow said nothing was agreed during what Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov described “an extremely useful, constructive and substantive conversation”.
“A direct exchange of views took place yesterday for the first time. Some things were accepted, some things were deemed unacceptable – this is a normal working process in the search for a compromise,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
“We are, of course, grateful for these efforts by the Trump administration, and we are all prepared to meet for as long as it takes to reach a peaceful resolution,” he added, noting that a call between Mr Putin and Us president Donald Trump could be arranged any time, but for the moment talks would continue between lower-level officials.
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“It is at the expert level that specific results must be achieved, which will then form the basis for contacts at the highest level,” Mr Peskov said.
After spending Tuesday in Ireland, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy travelled to Brussels, where Nato foreign ministers discussed ways to support his country and bring a negotiated end to nearly four years of full-scale war.
He said senior Ukrainian defence officials Rustem Umerov and Andrii Hnatov would “brief their colleagues in Europe on what is known following yesterday’s contacts by the American side in Moscow, and they will also discuss the European component of the necessary security architecture”.
“After Brussels [they] will begin preparations for a meeting with envoys of president Trump in the United States. As always, Ukraine will work constructively in pursuit of a real peace,” Mr Zelenskiy added.
It is not clear what the US peace proposals now include, after Kyiv and European capitals criticised an initial 28-point framework plan that heavily favoured Russia, and then the Kremlin rejected Europe’s input into the process. Mr Ushakov mentioned a 27-point plan and four other documents on Tuesday, but did not explain what they covered.
Shortly before the talks in the Kremlin, Mr Putin accused Europe of trying to derail peace efforts and warned that Russia was ready to fight Europe “right now” if it wanted a war; his bellicose language was viewed in Kyiv as his latest attempt to intimidate Europe and make it drop any idea of sending peacekeepers to postwar Ukraine.
Russia wants its talks with the US to remain confidential, fuelling fears in Ukraine and many European capitals that Mr Putin and Mr Trump could strike a secret agreement and present it to the world as a done deal.
“The more these negotiations are conducted in silence, the more productive they will be,” Mr Peskov said. “In this case, we are not proponents of megaphone diplomacy, and we also see that the Americans follow this same principle.”
The European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said it planned to push ahead with plans to raise €90 billion in funding for Ukraine by leveraging frozen Russian assets or through a loan based on EU common borrowing.
The Commission could use emergency powers to bypass Belgium’s concerns over the use of frozen assets that sit mostly in its banking system, and prevent more Kremlin-friendly EU states such as Hungary and Slovakia from blocking the funding.
Hungary said it would mount a legal challenge to an EU decision to end all Russian gas imports to the bloc by late 2027, and Slovakia said it was considering a similar move.
