Zelenskyy hails restored US intelligence sharing as peace talks advance in Oslo

Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Oslo on a Tuesday afternoon with a specific message: the United States and Ukraine are talking again, and this time, the conversation includes something that had been broken for months. Intelligence sharing on Russian missile strikes, he said, is working now. The emphasis was his own, and it mattered because it signaled a restoration of trust at a moment when the war in Ukraine had begun to feel like it might, finally, move toward negotiation.

The Ukrainian president spent the day in meetings with US peace envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, flanked by Norway's prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finland's president Alexander Stubb. The talks ranged across the architecture of any eventual settlement: security guarantees for Ukraine after the fighting stops, possible ceasefire arrangements focused on energy and food security, air defense systems, and the question of territory and sanctions. Witkoff would leave Oslo the next morning bound for Russia, carrying with him the proposals that had emerged from these discussions—a signal that the diplomatic machinery, however tentative, was moving.

Zelenskyy was careful about what he claimed. He said Ukraine wants peace more than anyone, but he also said that Russia started this war and that Russia alone decides whether the killing continues. He insisted on a principle that had become non-negotiable: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. When asked about reports of a possible trilateral meeting between the United States, China, and Russia, he was direct. If such a meeting concerned Ukraine's future, Ukraine had to be at the table. He went further, suggesting that only a summit between Trump, Putin, and himself could resolve the most intractable issues—the ones where only leaders could move the needle.

The human weight of the war surfaced in his words. Ukraine is not losing the war, he said, but it is losing people and time. Children do not have real childhoods. That urgency—not panic, but a clear-eyed recognition that every day of fighting costs something irreplaceable—shaped his push to accelerate talks. He had spoken with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier that day about sensitive matters: Starlink access, interceptor missiles, intelligence sharing. He hoped to speak with Rubio again within forty-eight hours.

Finland's Stubb, whose country shares a border with Russia and understands the stakes intimately, said the day had achieved genuine progress on two levels: the immediate and the long-term. They had found elements of peace to carry forward. He acknowledged the noise in the media but said that on a technical level, the parties were aligned. Peace requires patience, he said, but war does not wait. People are dying every day. Norway's Støre echoed the sentiment: war is unpredictable and does not follow a plan, which is why diplomacy sometimes needs to reset the thinking.

What remained unknown was how Russia would respond. Witkoff's journey to St. Petersburg—or Moscow, depending on which account you believed—would test whether the proposals discussed in Oslo could move the conversation forward or whether they would hit a wall. Stubb said the process was back on track, but he also said the key would be what messages Witkoff brought back from Russia. The next day would be a new day, he said. Hopefully there would be no backtracking. But in a war, hope and uncertainty are always tangled together, and no one in that room could guarantee what would come next.