Witkoff’s meeting with Putin will be during the second half of Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Speaking after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Monday, Zelensky said Kyiv’s priorities in peace talks were maintaining Ukraine’s sovereignty and securing strong security guarantees.
Zelensky said the “territorial issue is the most difficult” element of the peace deal, with the Kremlin continuing to push for Ukraine to cede territory in the east which it still controls – something Kyiv has long-maintained it will never do.
The talks in Moscow on Tuesday come hours after Russian officials claimed to have captured the key strategic town of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, known in Russian as Krasnoarmeysk, and the north-eastern Ukrainian border town of Vovchansk.
Ukrainian officials made no acknowledgement that either city had fallen to Russia and open-source intelligence projects monitoring the front lines of the war suggested neither Vovchansk nor Pokrovsk had yet been fully captured by the Russian army.
The head of Ukraine’s centre for countering disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, said it seemed Russia’s main aim was to ensure all the pressure in the US peace plan was put on Ukraine.
Russia has spent almost a year and a half trying to capture Pokrovsk and released a video showing Putin visiting a command post at the weekend in which he was quoted as saying Russia has made progress in “an important area, we all understand just how important”.
Ahead of his trip to Moscow, Witkoff also held talks with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Zelensky and Ukraine’s new chief negotiator Rustem Umerov, while several key European leaders virtually joined the Zelensky-Macron meeting.
Speaking on Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the draft peace deal had “been very much refined”, adding: “I think the administration feels very optimistic.”
She continued: “But as for the details, I will let the negotiators negotiate. But we do feel quite good, and we’re hopeful that this war can finally come to an end.”
Last week, Putin said he had seen a draft peace plan proposed by the US, and that it could become the “basis” for a future agreement to end the war.
However, Kremlin officials later cast doubt over whether it would accept the proposal after Kyiv and European allies said they had secured changes to it.
