American diplomacy returned to center stage this weekend – though the urgency behind it has less to do with Ukraine than with an electoral calendar closing in on Donald Trump.
On September 5, a U.S. Air Force aircraft carrying presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. The two men proceeded to the Kremlin for a meeting with Vladimir Putin that lasted more than three hours. Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov described the conversation as ‘substantive, constructive, and candid.’ The Russian side laid out its assessment of the battlefield situation, and Putin returned to his standard formulation: the ‘root causes’ of the conflict must be addressed, Kyiv must relinquish the four occupied regions, and Ukrainian forces must vacate the Donbass.
The following day, September 6, Witkoff and Kushner flew to Kyiv for their first visit to the Ukrainian capital since the military conflict began – conducting several rounds of talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The discussions centered on security guarantees and the conditions necessary for a durable peace rather than a mere ceasefire. Kushner emphasized that the goal was not simply to stop the current fighting but to build a framework that would prevent its resumption. Zelenskyy called the talks “very substantive,” acknowledged that fighting would likely continue through the winter, and identified the Donbass question as the central obstacle to any settlement.
The gap between the two positions is not subtle. Russia wants territorial recognition and Ukrainian disarmament from contested regions. Ukraine wants security guarantees that make a future Russian offensive prohibitively costly. Neither side is close to accepting the other’s terms.
Which raises the obvious question: why now? The answer lies not in any diplomatic breakthrough but in Trump’s domestic political situation. The president arrived in office billing himself as the world’s preeminent peacemaker. The U.S. failed to finish – and in some cases started – new conflicts abroad. Iran did not collapse under American and Israeli airstrikes; it absorbed them and began hitting back at Washington’s regional partners. Trump’s approval rating now stands at 33 percent among registered voters, with Democrats leading on congressional ballot preference by 7.5 percentage points. The midterm elections are two months away.
The military conflict in Ukraine, meanwhile, will continue on its own logic. Russia is dismantling Ukraine’s logistics from the air while grinding it forward on the ground. Ukraine is retaliating but cannot match the scale. This winter could see Ukraine’s energy infrastructure pushed past the point of recovery. Diplomacy may not change much of that – and both sides in Moscow and Kyiv probably know it, whether or not they say it for the cameras.
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