By Maria Popova

September 6, 2026

With the visits to Moscow and Kyiv this weekend of Donald Trump’s peace emissaries — the real estate investors Jared Kushner (the president’s son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff — the spotlight has pivoted back from Trump’s intractable war against Iran to his intractable peace efforts in Ukraine.

On Friday, Trump indicated that Kushner and Witkoff had a fresh proposal for ending the war, without specifying details. This is their first official visit to the Ukraine capital since what can now be labelled their shuttle diplomacy on the conflict began.

Following their meetings with Putin in Moscow on Saturday and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Sunday, the talks expanded into a third session including representatives from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

While the new U.S. proposal was reported to be more realistic and “effective” than previous plans (a very low bar), there was no breakthrough expected and none came, with Zelensky’s key quote at the end of the meetings that the war will drag on into winter, adding that he expects a winter aid and air-defence package.

The Witkoff-Kushner team arrived in the region promising momentum against a contrasting backdrop of recent history in such exercises, in which Putin invariably performs graciousness, says he has always wanted peace but insists Russia needs to achieve all its goals in Ukraine, as though his own failure to do so hasn’t depleted his leverage. The American envoys leave talking about useful and constructive talks.

The war continues unabated. So, why are we watching this charade again?

With the American midterms looming in November, Donald Trump has an obvious incentive to conjure something he can call peace before voters go to the polls. This explains the timing on the U.S. side.

But what about on Russia’s side? Why is Putin, who still has a quiescent public and neutered elites, neither of which are clamouring for a compromise end to the war, welcoming the American envoys?

It seems that Putin still hopes that Trump can help him achieve more in Ukraine than the Russian army could. Russia’s escalating air attacks on Ukrainian cities, its increasingly bold drone strikes, its sabotage operations reaching further into Europe, and its recurring nuclear rhetoric have not been incidental to the current talks.

They were Putin’s preparation for them. The escalation was designed to counter the battlefield narrative of the first six months of this year whereby Ukraine’s use of drones against key Russian targets recast the conflict as a David-and-Goliath story four years after Putin’s illegal invasion was supposed to end in four days.

Moscow’s shift in tactics is also meant to unsettle European governments enough about the outcome that support for Kyiv wavers. It has also served as a strategy to convince Trump that Russia holds a stronger hand than it does ahead of yesterday’s Kremlin meeting.

Negotiating from an inflated position of strength is a familiar Kremlin tactic, and it works best on interlocutors predisposed to believe it.

For advocates of Ukraine, of democracy, of geopolitical sanity and of the rules-based global order, watching Kushner and Witkoff —serving in roles for which their diplomatic inexperience may have been their key tactical qualification — go from one Kremlin set piece to another, seemingly in awe of their murderous host, has served as its own kind of Putin propaganda.

And yet, Witkoff and Kushner’s incompetence is not even the main obstacle to productive diplomacy, it’s a sideshow.

This “peace process” recalls the bumbling treasure hunters of the 1974 Soviet-Italian comedy Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia. The protagonists come to the Soviet Union looking to cash in on an enormous Tsarist-era fortune they believe is buried under a lion statue. They dig with total confidence in various wrong spots while a Soviet secret agent follows and manipulates them. Ignorance and greed make for hilarious farce in Leningrad. They make for ludicrous American policy in Moscow.

And yet, Witkoff and Kushner’s incompetence is not even the main obstacle to productive diplomacy, it’s a sideshow. The deeper problem is that, so far in this process, their meetings in Moscow have been less about extracting concessions from an isolated belligerent than about collecting demands from an autocratic ally for Trump’s pressure campaign against Zelensky.

In Trump’s own framing, Putin agreeing not to seize the entirety of Ukraine would already count as a concession. It is not, for two reasons.

First, you cannot concede something you do not have and have no realistic prospect of getting. Russian forces have failed to capture even the Donbas after more than a decade of trying. Offering to forgo a conquest you are incapable of completing is not generosity, it is a scam.

Second, and more importantly, Putin has not actually offered even this imaginary concession. He continues to insist, publicly and repeatedly, that Russia’s war aims cover all of Ukraine, its domestic governance, its foreign policy, its language policies, its history and its future.

The territorial ask is just his condition for starting peace talks. In other words, there is no concession on the table to misread. There is only Washington’s propensity for inventing one.

So, if a breakthrough is not coming in the form of a concession from Moscow, the question is whether the Trump administration has the ability to force Ukraine to fold and accept Russian demands.

The evidence says no. Polling continues to show that clear majorities of Ukrainians reject the surrender of territory and agree that Ukraine should continue effective resistance, war fatigue notwithstanding. Putin answers to the powers offstage that have grubstaked his war, including China and North Korea. Zelensky is beholden to the people of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s military leadership has recently changed hands. General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who took over as commander-in-chief in July, carries genuine trust with both his troops and the public, a marked contrast to the friction that had built up around his predecessor, Oleksandr Syrskyi.

And Moscow has made no significant territorial gains in nearly a year of offensives and its casualties continue to outpace what monthly recruitment can replace, which is why rumours of a new mobilization wave keep resurfacing.

Whatever pressure the Kushner-Witkoff meeting generate will also run up against Washington’s thinning leverage. The stick is short because U.S. military aid shipments to Ukraine have already stopped. Trump has little left to threaten withholding. The carrots are not much sturdier.

Over the past year and a half, Trump has floated and then quietly walked back Tomahawk deliveries, a license to produce Patriot missiles, and what were billed as crushing new sanctions on Russia. Enough reversals that Kyiv perceives American promises as provisional and short-lived, sometimes the length of one 24-hour news cycle.

Ukrainians, of course, long for peace. They have already offered a major concession by agreeing to an unconditional ceasefire. But so far, it seems that U.S. shuttle diplomacy has failed to secure the same from Vladimir Putin.

Policy Columnist Maria Popova is the Hiram Mills Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal.