“Russian President and Supreme Commander-in-Chief Putin ordered no strikes on Kyiv for three days, effective midnight today,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state news agency Tass on Saturday. “This is due to American talks in Kyiv.”
The pause was set to begin at midnight local time, 2100 GMT. It came as US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, were preparing to travel to the Ukrainian capital.
The two men had already reached Moscow earlier in the day for talks aimed at ending the war. Peskov said Vladimir Putin would meet them that evening. “The meeting with the president will indeed take place,” he said. “There will be a discussion. As a rule, they have been quite lengthy before.”
They are expected in Kyiv on Sunday. Neither has been there before, though both have made several trips to Moscow since US-mediated talks began. Their last Kremlin meeting with Putin was on 22 January.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had signalled on Friday that Kyiv would hold its own fire during the envoys’ time in Russia, and he called on Moscow to do the same once they reached Ukraine. Trump said the same day that Kushner and Witkoff were heading to Moscow not with new proposals but with one aimed at ending the war.
Talks on hold since February
Moscow and Kyiv last sat down for US-mediated negotiations earlier this year, in three rounds: 23 to 24 January, 4 to 5 February and 17 to 18 February. The first two were in Abu Dhabi and the third in Geneva. They have been paused since. Both governments blame Washington’s focus on Iran after war broke out there in late February.
