Four hours of meeting without results: Trump's special envoy loses patience with Putin

MoscowAfter weeks of stalemate in talks between Russia and the United States on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin met this Friday in St. Petersburg with Donald Trump's emissary, Steve Witkoff. The meeting lasted more than four hours and no agreement emerged. The White House defined it as "a further step toward a ceasefire and a final agreement," while the Russian government simply reported that "Ukraine was discussed." Once again, without Ukraine.

"We should not expect any progress," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, always ready to dampen any expectations, warned before the meeting. The Russian leader remains faithful to the strategy of diluting the prospect of US progress in Ukraine, while spurring diplomatic and trade contacts with the aim of restoring bilateral relations.

This is the third meeting between Putin and Witkoff in the last two months. On this occasion they were also accompanied by two key figures of the Russian negotiating team: presidential advisor Yuri Ukhakov and the director of the Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev.

"A senseless war"

Coinciding with the start of the meeting, the US president has once again insisted that Putin must stop the attacks in Ukraine. "Russia must act. Too many people are dying, thousands every week, in a terrible and senseless war," he wrote to Truth Social, the same day that it has emerged that the US president could order new sanctions against Russia if a ceasefire is not reached by the end of the month, sources have informed Axios.

Likewise, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recalled that exactly a month ago Kiev and Washington's proposal for a thirty-day truceThe Ukrainian president complained on Monday about US inaction in the face of the Russian military escalation. "We are waiting for the United States to respond; so far, there has been no response," he lamented.

Meanwhile, Putin had been missing for 10 days. With the world watching the trade war unleashed by Trump, the Kremlin leader had vanished from the public agenda, beyond the low-profile daily meetings his team broadcasts in canned videos.

The Russian president's roadmap does not want any noise. He needs time on the battlefield to expel Ukrainian soldiers from the Russian regions of Kursk and Belgorod, where Kiev has admitted the presence of his troops for the first time, while preparing for a new offensive in the Ukrainian regions of Sumi and Kharkiv, which should serve as his currency. At the same time, he buries any ceasefire proposal under conditions and lets it die of starvation, like the initiative for a truce in the Black Sea, which no one is talking about anymore.

His inflexibility when it comes to giving in on anything regarding Ukraine turns into solicitude when it comes to addressing bilateral relations with the United States. Just before the meeting with Putin, Witkoff had met alone with Dmitriev at a hotel. According to CNN, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund played a key role in the prisoner exchange that took place this Thursday, a new gesture by Putin to please his counterpart, and is responsible for seducing Trump with business proposals.