According to a White House official, the two men had a telephone exchange on Wednesday before the resumption of negotiations on Thursday in Geneva.
US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky had a telephone exchange on Wednesday, a White House official told AFP. “I just spoke with President Donald Trump,” confirmed Volodymyr Zelensky on social media Wednesday. “President Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were also in the conversation,” he added.
This meeting, which “lasted about 30 minutes,” according to Ukrainian presidential adviser Dmitro Lytvyn, took place the day before a meeting on Thursday between Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Oumerov and Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner.
The Kremlin’s economic commissioner, Kirill Dmitriev, also planned to travel to Geneva on Thursday “to continue negotiations with the Americans on the economic front,” a source cited Wednesday by the Russian state news agency Tass said. Mr. Dmitriev has met with the two American envoys multiple times to discuss negotiations regarding a resolution to the conflict in Ukraine.
Washington is pressuring to end the war, triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the worst armed conflict in Europe since World War II with hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, millions of Ukrainian refugees abroad, and massive destruction especially in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Complex Issues
“We discussed the issues that our representatives will address tomorrow in Geneva during the bilateral meeting,” said Mr. Zelensky, “as well as the preparations for the upcoming full negotiating team meeting, which will take place in a trilateral format at the beginning of March with Russia.”
“We expect this meeting to create an opportunity to elevate the discussions to a leadership level,” added the Ukrainian head of state. He had already stated that a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin should occur to resolve the most delicate points of the negotiations.
Negotiations, based on a US plan unveiled at the end of 2025, are mainly stuck on the fate of the Donbass, the large industrial basin in eastern Ukraine: Moscow demands that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the areas they still control in the Donetsk region, something Kiev rejects. “President Trump supports this series of steps. This is the only way to address all complex and sensitive issues and finally end the war,” said Mr. Zelensky.
Meetings in Geneva
Geneva hosted a previous round of talks between Ukrainians and Russians in mid-February under American mediation, which did not lead to tangible results. Earlier on Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelensky clarified that Thursday’s discussions would also focus on the “recovery” economic plan for Ukraine, devastated by the conflict with Russia, and the preparation for a new prisoner exchange between Kiev and Moscow.
Since the start of the massive Russian offensive against Ukraine, these exchanges have been one of the few concrete progressions from contact between the two warring parties. Thursday’s American-Ukrainian meeting aims to “explore different ways in which we could achieve a peace agreement,” said Steve Witkoff in a video statement during a conference in Kiev on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Ukraine marked four years since the beginning of the invasion of its territory, with President Zelensky congratulating that Vladimir Putin had “not achieved his war objectives” or “broken the Ukrainians,” while Russia threatened to “continue” hostilities.
