Did Steve Witkoff make any progress with Vladimir Putin?

Rarely, if ever, has Vladimir Putin been called a "humanitarian".

It is not generally a word used to describe people who start wars.

But, "humanitarian", is how US special envoy Steve Witkoff described the Russian president when he met him in St Petersburg on Wednesday as part of the Trump administration’s latest move to restart talks to end the war in Ukraine.

Mr Witkoff’s comment was made in reference to Mr Putin’s decision to free Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old US citizen who was detained by Russian forces in occupied eastern Ukraine in 2022.

He was later sentenced in 2024 to six years in prison on a charge of fighting for Ukraine as a mercenary.

"You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that. I commend you, and I thank you again," Mr Witkoff told the Russian president in front of the Russian media in the Kremlin.

For Ukrainians, such a comment must have smacked of utter insensitivity.

Building a reputation

Perhaps, Mr Witkoff was just eager to please his host, but it was an unfortunate and naïve word choice to describe the man who ordered the invasion of Ukraine and began Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.

Mr Witkoff, a former real estate developer and decades-long associate of US President Donald Trump, has been in the diplomacy game for just under two years.

Tasked by Mr Trump to be Washington’s point person with Moscow and Kyiv and bring about a peace agreement to end the fighting, Mr Witkoff has often appeared to lack essential knowledge about the conflict.

He struggled to name the four regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion in an interview with Tucker Carlson last year and had previously seemed to misunderstand Mr Putin's position on occupied Ukrainian territory and security guarantees for Ukraine on at least two occasions.

Mr Witkoff's visit to St Petersburg on Wednesday was his ninth meeting with the Russian president since February 2025.

A rare sight in Kyiv

By contrast, he and Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law who is tasked with assisting Mr Witkoff to deliver a peace agreement, visited Kyiv for the first time last month.

It could be argued that those nine visits to Moscow and St Petersburg were given precedence by the Trump administration because the duo needed to work harder to engage Russian officials in dialogue.

But overall, it is hard not to read Witkoff and Kushner’s reticence to visit Kyiv more often as anything other than favouring Moscow in the process.

Wednesday's meeting was an "imitation of a peace process," Volodymyr Dubovyk, a Ukrainian professor of international relations, told RTÉ News.

"You actually don't have any peace diplomacy, you don't have any peace plan on the part of the US, you don't have any creative ideas that someone in Washington would come up with, and give them as a list to the Ukrainians and Russians.

"I don't know why Witkoff is going there. Maybe the tea is good or something," said Prof Dubovyk from Odesa Mechnikov National University.

Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner’s meetings with the Russian president and other senior Russian officials have often been followed by statements from the Kremlin along the lines of: "progress was made", or that talks were "substantive".

Little movement from the Kremlin

None of those meetings have so far led to concessions from Moscow.

A statement on Wednesday by Dmitry Ushakov, a senior Kremlin advisor who attended the meeting, made it clear that the Kremlin’s approach to, what it calls, "the Ukrainian crisis" has not changed an iota.

Mr Ushakov said Russia’s president had stressed during the meeting that the "initiative remains entirely with Russian troops" along the line of contact, essentially claiming that Russia holds the battlefield initiative.

This is not true. A drone-enforced 'kill zone' has effectively frozen the front over the past two months. Little ground is gained by either side.

Mr Ushakov also downplayed new European proposals to reach a peace agreement, formulated by Mr Zelensky and the leaders of Norway and Finland in Oslo earlier this week.

"There was little in them that could help resolve the Ukraine crisis," was how Mr Ushakov described the Ukrainian-Finish-Norwegian plans after Mr Witkoff brought them with him to Moscow.

They included security guarantees for Ukraine, plans to fund Ukraine’s postwar recovery and a ceasefire on energy infrastructure.

Mr Ushakov stated that economic projects between the US and Russia "were also discussed in detail".

Tri-lateral talks to resume

There was some progress to come out of the meeting: the Russian president agreed to a US and European backed proposal to restart three-way talks between US, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators.

Both Kyiv and Moscow have confirmed that the first round of talks is scheduled to take place in Abu Dhabi in early November.

However, Vladimir Putin’s views on how to end the war have not changed and he is unlikely to instruct his negotiators to give any quarter on the key issue of occupied territory.

Russia’s leader made that clear on Thursday evening when he told an interviewer from Russian state television that he wants a final peace agreement, not a ceasefire.

The latter is favoured by Ukraine and the Europeans as a first step towards defining the terms of a long-lasting peace agreement.

One day prior to the meeting in St Petersburg, Mr Witkoff met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo, where the Ukrainian-Finnish-Norwegian additions to the existing core European position on how to end the war were discussed.

Both Mr Zelensky and Mr Witkoff appear to share a good relationship. Both men hugged when they meet on Tuesday.

Their meeting in Oslo took place one week after Mr Trump had eased sanctions on Russian diesel exports to the US, declared a phony energy truce and called for Ukraine to hold elections during wartime and elect a new president.

Mr Trump's favourable policy shift towards Russia, the Ukrainian military's connectivity issues with Starshield this week and Russia's escalating strikes on critical Ukrainian energy and commercial infrastructure have compounded Ukraine's difficulties as the country heads into winter.

Relying on European support

It is a trying time for Mr Zelensky who must now rely more than ever on European financial support to make sure Ukraine gets through this winter, and also European diplomacy to persuade the Trump administration to ease its pressure on Kyiv to give in to Moscow's demands.

"I think that the involvement of Europeans, against Putin's objections and Trump’s preferences, shields Zelensky from the worst options, but good ones may not be available," Pavel K. Baev, a Russian foreign policy expert at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told RTÉ News.

Mr Witkoff and, by extension, Mr Kushner can lay claim to successfully getting Russian officials to take part in the first trilateral talks since February.

But otherwise, Mr Witkoff's latest meeting in Russia did not manage to soften Mr Putin's demands for ending the war.

They remain the same as when he first announced them in June 2024.