US special envoy Steve Witkoff is set to join talks with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Wednesday, as the Ukrainian president said he wanted to “intensify” peace negotiations.
“Bringing the end of the war closer with all our might is Ukraine’s top priority,” Zelensky said, adding that efforts would also focus on resuming prisoner exchanges.
Turkey has maintained ties with both Kyiv and Moscow and has previously hosted talks between the two factions.
But no Russian representative is set to join the meeting in Ankara, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
He added that while there were “no concrete plans” for Vladimir Putin to speak to either the Turkish side or to Witkoff, the Russian president was “of course open to a conversation”.
Ankara will be the fourth capital Zelensky visits in only a few days. In Athens he secured a gas deal, in Paris he signed a deal with France to obtain up to 100 fighter jets and in Madrid he held talks on co-operation with Spanish arms manufacturers.
The visits are part of Zelensky’s mission to try to shore up European support for Ukraine while Russian attacks on the country intensify and Moscow’s troops close in on the key city eastern city of Pokrovsk.
Domestically, Zelensky is facing the most serious crisis in years. Several members of his closest circle are under investigation for co-organising a large-scale criminal scheme, and two ministers have resigned.
The scandal threatens to widen still and some EU leaders – who in December will decide whether to unblock a €140bn (£121bn) loan for Kyiv based on frozen Russian state assets – have warned Zelensky needs to do more to tackle corruption.
As the fourth anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 inches closer, Moscow and Kyiv remain fundamentally opposed in their views of how to end the war.
Earlier in November Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia’s conditions for a peace deal had not changed since Putin laid them out in 2024.
At the time, the Russian president demanded that Kyiv renounce any ambition to join Nato, as well as full Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Zelensky has repeatedly argued that withdrawing from Donetsk and Luhansk – together known as the Donbas – would leave the rest of the country vulnerable to future attacks.
Following a long meeting with Putin in April, Witkoff appeared to suggest that a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv hinged on the status of the contested Ukrainian regions as well as Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. This stance led to tensions with Zelensky, who accused him of “disseminating Russian narratives”.
Zelensky and Witkoff have not met since early September. Although the summer saw a flurry of high-level talks and meetings – including between Trump and Putin – American efforts to bring a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine closer have stalled.
At one point, it appeared Trump and Putin were about to meet again in Budapest –but that summit was scrapped, apparently after the US side became aware that Moscow had no intention of budging from several demands that were unacceptable to Kyiv.
But contact between US and Russian officials has continued, albeit under the radar. Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev was reportedly in Washington for meetings with Witkoff in late October, only days after Trump imposed sanctions on Russia’s two biggest oil companies.
