In the long and tangled history of great power diplomacy, moments of direct contact between adversaries carry meaning beyond their immediate content. At the Kremlin in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin received American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, representatives of the Trump administration, in a meeting aimed at finding a path out of the Ukraine war now entering its fourth year. That such a meeting occurred at all — between Russian presidential leadership and senior American emissaries — signals a willingness, however tentative, to test whether dialogue can accomplish what