US special envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Friday as Donald Trump urged the Russian president to “get moving” on a ceasefire in Ukraine.
It will be Witkoff’s third meeting with Putin this year, during which the US has failed to get Russia to agree to a full ceasefire with Ukraine.
Trump has previously expressed frustration with Putin over the state of talks. On Friday, he wrote on social media: “Russia has to get moving. Too many people ere [sic] DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war.”
The meeting comes as the UK and Germany chaired a gathering of Ukraine’s allies in Brussels, where 50 nations agreed €21bn (£18.2bn) in military aid for Kyiv.
Before the talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was “no need to expect breakthroughs” as the “process of normalising relations is ongoing”.
Before his talks with Putin, Witkoff first met Kirill Dmitriev at the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg where a conference was being held on stainless steel and the Russian market.
Dmitriev, the 49-year-old head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, visited Washington DC last week and was the most senior Russian official to go to the US since the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Asked if discussions could include setting up a date for Putin and Trump to meet, Peskov said: “Let’s see. It depends on what Witkoff has come with.”
Trump has previously claimed he could end the Ukraine-Russia conflict “in 24 hours”. On Friday, he declared that it would not have happened at all if he’d been in the White House in 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
“A war that should ld have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!,” he wrote.
Trump has had a fractious relationship with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky since his second term as US president began, culminating in an angry confrontation in the Oval Office in February.
The US attempted to broker a limited ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, only for it to stall when the Kremlin asked for sanctions imposed after it launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour to be lifted.
Trump has since said he is “very angry” and “pissed off” with Putin over the progress of agreeing a truce between Kyiv and Moscow.
Earlier this week, Washington and Moscow went ahead with a prisoner swap.
Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American, was sentenced to 12 years in jail in Russia for donating $51 to a Ukrainian charity when the war began in February 2022.
The Los Angeles resident was freed on Thursday morning and exchanged for Arthur Petrov, a dual German-Russian citizen arrested in Cyprus in 2023.
He was accused of illegally exporting microelectronics to Russia for manufacturers working with the military.
