Europe to Join Ukraine Peace Talks as Kushner Brokers Expansion; Putin Rejects Peacekeepers

Late on Thursday, after sitting down with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Jared Kushner announced that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to widen the next round of peace negotiations to include European countries. Kushner, Donald Trump's envoy and son-in-law, posted on X that the change would let negotiators take up broader postwar European security arrangements alongside the territorial questions between Kyiv and Moscow. He added that the sides were working toward what he described as the largest prisoner exchange of the war, one that could reunite thousands of people with their families.

Kushner and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff then flew from Moscow to Ireland, where they attended a European summit and met Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president said he welcomed the prospect of European participation. He said he hoped the agenda would include steps toward a ceasefire and de-escalation, and that the group had decided to work on an agenda covering any kind of de-escalation and some kind of ceasefires.

Witkoff, speaking to Russian state television after the Kremlin meeting, said the Europeans would join at the next session. He called that a very important moment, saying they are partners and that it matters that they take part. Kushner told Putin that Washington had detected what he called a big change on the European side, and that he was confident bringing them in would not slow progress.

Putin's own remarks were less accommodating. He warned Europe against sending peacekeeping troops into Ukraine as part of any settlement, calling such a deployment a continuation of war. He refused to soften Russia's territorial demands. On dialogue with Europe, he said Moscow had never opposed it and never broke it off; in his telling, the Europeans were the ones who ended it. He asked the American envoys to press their European allies to decide finally whether they want peace or war in Ukraine. The exchange showed how far apart Moscow and European capitals remain on how the war should end.

Zelenskyy raised two concerns of his own. He called the American approach of discussing a new European security order with Russia a bit strange. He also said new restrictions were disrupting Starshield, the military version of SpaceX's Starlink, which Ukraine relies on for battlefield communications. Earlier on Thursday he had said the disruptions affected the entire frontline and Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine, and Ukraine had seen similar outages the previous month. He said Kyiv knew very little so far, but that if someone in America was making decisions that treat Ukrainian territory as if it were not Ukrainian, that showed where things were heading. SpaceX declined to comment.

The fighting continued while the diplomacy went on. Governor Oleh Hryhorov said a Russian drone strike killed two people in Ukraine's northern Sumy region late Thursday. In Rivne, in the north-west, a local official said five people were injured early Friday when a Russian drone hit an apartment building. In Russia's Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, local officials said a drone attack killed one man and injured four others. Separately, Ukrainian agricultural company Kernel Holding said it had suspended operations at all of its oilseed extraction plants after a series of Russian attacks on its facilities.

The story is now at day 1,724 of the war. What to watch is whether European participation and a possible large prisoner exchange can move the talks toward a ceasefire, given Putin's rejection of peacekeepers and his firm territorial position.