{"id":50754,"date":"2025-12-04T01:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T07:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=50754"},"modified":"2025-12-04T03:26:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T09:26:01","slug":"trump-says-witkoff-kushner-had-reasonably-good-meeting-with-putin-despite-no-breakthrough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=50754","title":{"rendered":"Trump says Witkoff, Kushner had &#8216;reasonably good meeting&#8217; with Putin despite no breakthrough"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">President Donald Trump on Wednesday said U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner had a &#8220;reasonably good meeting&#8221; with Russian President Vladimir Putin during&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/International\/putin-witkoff-prepare-meet-white-house-optimistic\/story?id=128025858\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">high-stakes negotiations in Moscow<\/a>, adding that the U.S. negotiators believed Putin &#8220;would like to end the war.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what the Kremlin is doing. I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We&#8217;re going to find out. It&#8217;s a war that should have never been started,&#8221; Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Trump said he spoke with Witkoff and Kushner Tuesday night following their meeting at the Kremlin.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;What comes out of that meeting? I can&#8217;t tell you, because it does take two to tango,&#8221; Trump said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;He would like to end the war,&#8221; Trump said of Putin. &#8220;That was their impression. Now, whether or not you know that was their impression, you know their impression was that they&#8217;d like to see he would like to see the war ended.&#8221;<a href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/International\/putin-witkoff-prepare-meet-white-house-optimistic\/story?id=128025858\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;I think he&#8217;d like to get back to dealing a more normal life. I think he&#8217;d like to be trading with the United States of America, frankly, instead of, you know, losing thousands of soldiers a week. But their impression was very strongly that he&#8217;d like to make a deal,&#8221; Trump said of Putin.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Witkoff and Kushner have invited Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov to Miami on Thursday for further peace talks, according to a senior U.S. administration official.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Witkoff and Kushner conducted marathon talks with Putin to bring about the end of the nearly four-year Russian invasion of Ukraine, but no immediate breakthroughs were announced by either side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Though both sides in the negotiations &#8212; led by Witkoff and Kushner from the U.S. &#8212; and Putin who conducted negotiations in Moscow &#8212; vowed secrecy and provided no comprehensive briefings of their discussion, it became clear that a deal for peace was not yet in hand as Trump has long desired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;So far no compromise option has been found, but some American proposals appear more or less acceptable,&#8221; said Putin&#8217;s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, who was in the room for the Moscow meeting and spoke to Russian media afterward. &#8220;The president did not hide our critical or negative view of certain proposals.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;We agreed on some things &#8230; while others caused criticism, and the president [Putin] also made no secret of our critical, even negative, attitude toward a number of proposals. But the main thing is that we had a very useful discussion,&#8221; Ushakov said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">It&#8217;s unclear which peace plan was presented to the Russians after details of an initial 28-point plan were presented to Ukraine last month. Kyiv and its European allies worked quickly to amend down to a 19-point plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">None of the parties involved in the negotiations this week has detailed the current version of the proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Following the high-profile meeting between Witkoff, Kushner and Putin &#8212; in which the U.S. delegation presented Putin with four documents outlining Washington&#8217;s plan &#8212; Ukraine&#8217;s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said negotiators from Kyiv would meet with European leaders in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss the outcome of the Kremlin meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">He added that senior negotiator Umerov and army chief Andrii Hnatov would then prepare for meetings with the U.S. envoys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Geopolitical experts believe the essence of the entire Ukraine-Russia peace plan now hinges on two main points: territory concessions and security guarantees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was not part of the American delegation sent to Moscow, said late Tuesday that &#8220;some progress&#8221; had been made on the truce proposal, but &#8220;we&#8217;re still not there &#8212; we&#8217;re still not close enough.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">He stressed that &#8220;only Putin can end this war on the Russian side.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">He also highlighted a major sticking point in the peace deal: Moscow&#8217;s continued demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the entire Donbas region. Ukraine has long rejected ceding territory to Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;What they&#8217;re literally fighting over now is about a 30-to-50 kilometer space and the 20% of the Donetsk region that remains,&#8221; Rubio said on Fox News. &#8220;And so, what we have tried to do &#8212; and I think have made some progress &#8212; is figure out what could the Ukrainians live with that gives them security guarantees for the future they&#8217;re never going to be invaded again.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Rubio further outlined that the peace plan should also address Ukraine&#8217;s long-term sovereignty and independence &#8220;so that they don&#8217;t become a puppet state&#8221; while also allowing for Ukraine&#8217;s economy to recover and prosper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re trying to achieve here,&#8221; Rubio said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">John Hardie, Russia Program Deputy Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that if the Kremlin refuses to come to the bargaining table, a peace deal will remain elusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;The Kremlin remains unwilling to make the compromises necessary for a settlement Kyiv can live with. Until that changes, President Trump&#8217;s diplomatic efforts are unlikely to produce a deal, let alone one that protects U.S. and Ukrainian interests,&#8221; Hardie told ABC News. &#8220;Washington needs to work with its allies and Ukraine to maximize military, economic, and diplomatic pressure on Moscow.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">But Rubio stressed in his television interview that it&#8217;s up to both Ukraine and Russia to settle their differences to reach a durable and lasting peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;And at the end of the day, it&#8217;s not up to us.&nbsp;&nbsp;It&#8217;s not our war.&nbsp;&nbsp;We&#8217;re not fighting it; there aren&#8217;t American soldiers.&nbsp;&nbsp;It&#8217;s on another continent.&nbsp;&nbsp;We are engaged because we&#8217;re the only ones that can,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The only leader in the world that can talk to both sides and make a deal, if a deal is possible, is President Trump.&nbsp;&nbsp;And he&#8217;s been very patient.&nbsp;&nbsp;He&#8217;s dedicated a lot of time to it.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;Ultimately, it&#8217;s going to be up to them. If they decide they don&#8217;t want to end the war, then the war will continue,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was in Putin&#8217;s &#8220;interest just to keep the process going, to have a long process of diplomatic engagement.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">&#8220;He wants to have a broader conversation about Russia&#8217;s reintegration with the West and relations with the United States, commercial agreements with the United States, and to make this long and drawn out while he continues to bomb Ukraine&#8217;s energy infrastructure and makes incremental progress on the ground,&#8221; Froman said during a televised interview Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><a href=\"https:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Politics\/trump-witkoff-kushner-good-meeting-putin-despite-breakthrough\/story?id=128083189\">abcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Donald Trump on Wednesday said U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner had a &#8220;reasonably good meeting&#8221; with Russian President Vladimir Putin during&nbsp;high-stakes negotiations in Moscow, adding that the U.S. negotiators believed Putin &#8220;would like to end the war.&#8221; &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what the Kremlin is doing. I can tell you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":50755,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[7407,1230,35528],"class_list":["post-50754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-says","tag-trump","tag-witkoff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50756,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50754\/revisions\/50756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}