Between Elections and Escalation: Why Did Trump’s Envoys Visit Moscow?
For Trump, the peace process is an operational concept, while his strategy towards Russia and Ukraine is generally shaped by the immediate priorities of the US administration. Negotiations may be put on hold and resumed depending less on the real prospects of reaching a ‘deal’ than on which issues are prioritised by the White House at any given moment.
In practice, US-Russian negotiations on Ukraine ground to a halt as early as the end of 2025. Over the following eight months, Washington’s policy towards the Kremlin focused primarily on containing the possibility of Russian cooperation with Tehran. This logic largely determined Trump’s vacillation in his approach to Kyiv and Moscow. However, at the same time, there was also a reassessment of the Kremlin’s military capabilities and of the cards Putin has up his sleeve.
Witkoff and Kushner’s current visit should be viewed in the context of the preceding mission by CIA Director Ratcliffe, whose task was to dissuade Moscow from escalating in the autumn and bring it back to a negotiating format. Following its failure, Trump sent Putin negotiators who are particularly comfortable for the Kremlin, essentially with the same objective, although it now appears less as a warning than as a request.
The main context for this diplomacy is the approaching US midterm elections. Against the backdrop of Trump’s low approval ratings and the prolonged war with Iran, a new escalation in Ukraine, particularly if it were to spread to Europe, would become a symbol of the failure of his foreign policy on virtually every front. Putin is probably prepared to play along with Trump for a time and avoid creating additional problems during the election period, but will almost certainly expect compensation for his restraint at a later date.
Analysing what is happening behind the scenes in the Russian-American negotiations on Ukraine is a thankless task. Apart from the secrecy typical of such situations, we are also dealing here with two forms of deliberate obfuscation. If Vladimir Putin’s trademark approach to statements on the war has been to mislead the public about the situation on the battlefield, Donald Trump’s trademark approach is to create a misleading picture of the progress of particular peace negotiations. On the rare occasions when Trump says there has been no progress in the negotiations, this is most likely true. But when he claims that progress has been made, it does not necessarily mean anything at all. Just as Putin constantly generates excitement around the prospect of imminent military victories, Trump constantly generates excitement around the prospect of imminent ‘deals’. For Trump, negotiations are an operational state, as has been clearly demonstrated both over the past year and in recent days.
Playing both sides
In reality, Trump’s peace initiative regarding Ukraine reached an impasse as early as the end of last year, when Kyiv refused to transfer the Donbas to Russian control without reliable, legally binding US guarantees, while Trump declined to provide such guarantees (→ Re:Russia: Three Tracks). Nevertheless, despite the unanimous scepticism of analysts, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner travelled to Moscow on 22–23 January this year. Following their visit, Trump effectively forced the Ukrainian delegation to join ‘technical’ trilateral talks involving Russia and the US, which took place over three rounds in Abu Dhabi and Geneva until mid-February. The talks produced no results, and it can now be assumed that they served primarily as a smokescreen, because from late December, when mass protests erupted in Iran, Trump’s attention was focused on Tehran, while by February his administration was fully occupied with preparations for war in the Iranian theatre.
Since the start of the war with Iran, the Russia-Ukraine issue has not simply fallen off Trump’s agenda. Moscow is a potential ally of Tehran, capable of providing it with substantial assistance. These suspicions are being articulated with increasing clarity by the Western media, whilst Putin has twice (on 9 March and 21 March) in statements to the Iranian leadership, described Russia as a reliable partner of Iran. At the same time, in late April, following the assassination attempt against Trump, Putin called him to offer his support. The conversation resulted in a three-day ceasefire for 9 May, which Putin needed, and a major prisoner exchange in Ukraine. These were, however, largely gestures of a personal nature. Trump rejected Putin’s offers to mediate in negotiations with Iran and put his own initiatives regarding Russia on hold.
Following Putin’s subsequent birthday call to Trump on 14 June, Moscow announced an imminent visit to the capital by Witkoff and Kushner (in the days that followed, Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov raised the issue publicly three times, while his press secretary Dmitry Peskov mentioned it once). However, as early as 21 June, Ushakov (followed by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov) accused the US of having ‘backtracked’ on the understandings reached in Anchorage. In Russian diplomatic language, references to Anchorage indicate that Trump had, in principle, accepted during the meeting in Alaska the legitimacy of Russia’s claims to the part of the Donbas that it had not yet conquered as a condition for ending hostilities. From the Kremlin’s perspective, the US was supposed to force Ukraine to implement this understanding, or to ‘do its part’, as Ushakov put it, but failed to do so.
On 25 June, Moscow received a stern rebuke from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who stated that no agreements had been reached in Anchorage. This was also a signal that US-Russian relations were not the exclusive responsibility of Witkoff. Following Keith Kellogg’s departure from the administration, Rubio has emerged as the ‘hawk’ in the Trump administration’s approach to Russia.
In July, against a backdrop of increasingly persistent suspicions about Russian aid to Tehran, tensions between Moscow and Washington reached a climax. During a meeting with Zelensky on the sidelines of the NATO summit, Trump promised to grant Kyiv with licences to manufacture Patriot missiles. And, after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once again invoked the ‘spirit of Anchorage’,Rubio responded forcefully, saying that this track of negotiations was a thing of the past, and their continuation would require new ideas and concepts. The game between Moscow and Washington continues to be played on two fronts – Ukraine and Iran. In late July, Washington once again warned Moscow against selling arms to Iran and even imposed sanctions on two individuals and one company in Russia for their links with Tehran. However, Trump stated that he trusted Putin’s promise not to sell arms to Iran, and shortly afterwards walked back his promise to grant a licence for the Patriot system to Ukraine, just as he had previously withdrawn his intention to sell Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.
This overview demonstrates that Trump’s position towards Moscow and Kyiv depends to a considerable extent on which objectives are the main focus of his administration at any given moment. Throughout the war with Iran, this position has been driven primarily by the task of containing cooperation between the Kremlin and Tehran. The key role in the dialogue with Moscow has shifted to Rubio, who has effectively closed the Anchorage track: Washington no longer considers the Russian capture of the remaining part of the Donbas inevitable, nor does it regard Moscow’s claims to the territory as justified.
Two missions: Ratcliffe and Witkoff
The deadlock in the negotiating track was unexpectedly broken on 20 and 21 August by almost identical statements from Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova and Lavrov’s deputy Sergei Ryabkov. Both stated that Russia remained open to dialogue and was ready to listen to the ‘new ideas’ Rubio had mentioned in July.
However, the response to these statements was a visit to Moscow by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Of all the theories regarding the aims of this visit, only an article in The Washington Post explicitly cites sources close to Ratcliffe himself. According to these sources, his task was to dissuade the Kremlin from escalating the conflict in the autumn and to urge Moscow to consider negotiations, on the grounds that Russia’s position in the conflict with Ukraine was deteriorating and, according to US intelligence assessments, would continue to do so. The sources reportedly said that Ratcliffe himself acknowledged that he had failed to persuade the Kremlin. The newspaper had previously reported, presumably based on the same sources, that Putin believed Washington had been weakened by its confrontation with Iran, strengthening his desire to escalate the conflict in Ukraine.
This is an important contextual clarification: against the backdrop of the failure of Ratcliffe’s ‘bad cop’ attempt to prevent a possible escalation, Trump is sending the ‘good cops’, Witkoff and Kushner, to Moscow, supposedly carrying some ‘new ideas’ and an ‘updated’ peace plan. However, they received an ambiguous welcome in Russia. On the one hand, Putin emphasises that they are valued in Moscow and trusted. On the other, the Kremlin deploys the toughest version of its rhetoric on ‘peace’. When Moscow says that a peace agreement must ‘take into account the realities on the ground’, this means that Putin is demanding the handover of Donbas territories that Russia has not yet conquered. This reflects a longstanding practice of claiming territory in advance, with Putin and the Russian military regularly declaring territories and settlements to be Russian before they have actually been occupied. When Moscow speaks of the need to ‘eliminate the root causes’ of the conflict, this refers to restrictions on Ukrainian sovereignty as a condition for ending the war. In comments following a meeting with the US envoys, Ushakov used an even stronger formulation – ‘elimination of all the root causes of the conflict’ – which amounts to rejecting any form of compromise.
Back in Kyiv, Witkoff stated that the aim of his mission was to try to conclude a peace agreement before winter. However, even Kushner expressed cautious scepticism on this matter, whilst their negotiating partners in Kyiv did not even address this issue, preferring instead to discuss with the American envoys and European security advisers a ‘winter package’ for Ukraine, namely preparations for a difficult military winter, including air defence supplies, energy assistance from Europe and deliveries of liquefied natural gas from the US. Despite all this, on his X account, Witkoff wrote that some progress had been made during the consultations in Moscow, particularly regarding the resumption of trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US. Kushner clarified that this would be a format already tested in January and February 2026. Putin’s press secretary, Peskov, also did not rule out Russia’s participation.
It is clear that Witkoff and Kushner brought no new ideas for resolving the conflict. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv showed any interest in their mission in this respect, and both sides continue to prepare actively for a military winter. So why did they come?
Navigating a complex situation
The two visits to Moscow, by Ratcliffe and Witkoff, together with the announced trilateral negotiations, should probably be viewed not so much through the lens of a ‘peace process’, which is closer to a dead end than a live track, but in the broader and more immediate political context. This context is defined, on the one hand, by Putin’s apparent intention to escalate the conflict this autumn, as most analysts believe, and, on the other, by the approaching US midterm elections. Against the backdrop of Trump’s low approval ratings (with the net balance of responses according to the main polling aggregators ranging from -17 to -24 percentage points), the elections not only offer him little prospect of good news but have become a major political problem. In early September, odds on Polymarket suggested an 89% probability that the Democrats would win a majority in the House of Representatives, and a 51% probability that they would also win a majority in the Senate. If Trump loses control of both chambers, he would face not only a blockade of his legislative initiatives and a raft of investigations into his conduct, but also reduced room for manoeuvre over appointments.
At the same time, foreign policy ranks roughly third among the factors contributing to Trump’s negative approval rating, after inflation and overall assessments of the state of the economy. At the same time, the US administration’s ability to bring the war in Iran to a successful conclusion is highly limited. An escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, and particularly the prospect of its spreading to Europe, would amount to a complete failure of Trump’s foreign policy, given his self-presentation as someone capable of reaching an understanding with Putin. In these circumstances, the resumption of a ‘peace process’ over Ukraine in any form, even as a trilateral commission, would serve both as a demonstration of possible progress and as a degree of insurance against Moscow taking excessively escalatory steps that could complicate Trump’s position ahead of the elections.
In fact, President Zelensky appeared to endorse this interpretation of events, telling Axios yesterday evening that Putin ‘does not want to antagonize the US president ahead of the midterm elections, needs Trump and does not want to upset him’. Zelensky therefore believes that the coming weeks present a window for de-escalation. ‘There are ideas concerning energy facilities and grain supplies, electricity facilities, and oil and gas exports,’ Zelensky said, while cautioning that Kyiv and Moscow have different interests in these areas. It is important to note, however, that unlike Ratcliffe’s visit, Witkoff and Kushner’s mission now looks less like a warning and more like a request.
Putin himself may also have confirmed this interpretation of the diplomacy, albeit obliquely. In an interview with the Vesti programme, his spokesperson Peskov cryptically remarked that Putin’s greeting to Witkoff and Kushner at the start of the talks contained an important message. Putin’s address consisted of just 164 words. He welcomed his guests, sent his greetings to President Trump, said that the situation in Ukraine needs to be examined, and stressed that he trusts the envoys who have arrived, with whom he finds it ‘comfortable to work’. After asking them to convey his ‘very best wishes and words of gratitude’ to Trump, Putin added: ‘I understand that, in general, he is entering a difficult situation. Nevertheless, he is not abandoning his attempts to contribute to resolving the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.’ By ‘entering a difficult situation’, Putin may have been referring to the forthcoming elections, signalling his willingness to show understanding.
If this interpretation of Trump’s diplomacy is correct, and Putin is prepared to play along with him in the run-up to the elections, the good news is that Europe is probably unlikely to face a military confrontation with Putin in the next two months. The bad news, however, is that Putin is undoubtedly counting on being rewarded for his loyalty in the ‘difficult situation’ in which Donald Trump will find himself in the near future.