US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin meet at the Kremlin in Moscow, 25 April 2025. EPA-EFE/KRISTINA KORMILITSYNA/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL
Vladimir Putin’s insistence that Russia be granted full control over the four regions of eastern Ukraine it currently only partially occupies as part of any peace deal is stalling negotiations to end the war, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Citing three people in Moscow familiar with the negotiations, Bloomberg said that US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff had tried to persuade Putin to agree to a ceasefire along the current front line during a meeting at the Kremlin on Friday, but that the Russian leader “maintained his maximalist position on territory”.
Russia annexed the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine in violation of international law in 2022, but does not fully control any of them. Despite this, Putin has insisted on the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the entirety of all four regions as a prerequisite for peace.
Talks between Moscow and Washington on ending the war in Ukraine have now reached an “impasse”, one source said, with direct contact between Putin and US President Donald Trump needed to break the deadlock.
The report comes amid growing frustration in the White House at the lack of progress in talks to end the war, with the Trump administration repeatedly threatening to abandon the peace process should a breakthrough not be made soon.
On Friday, Trump said that Moscow and Kyiv were “very close” to a ceasefire deal following talks last week and that all that remained was for the two sides to meet to “finish it off”.
Just a day later, however, the US president changed his tone, writing on Truth Social that continued Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities had made him “think that maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along”.
On Tuesday, US State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce quoted Secretary of State Marco Rubio as saying Washington would walk away from peace talks unless it received “concrete proposals” on ending the war from both Moscow and Kyiv in the near future.
“If there is not progress, we will step back as mediators of the process”, Bruce told reporters in what she said was a statement from Rubio.
In an interview with NBC on Sunday, Rubio said the coming week would be “really important” for the US to determine whether talks with Russia and Ukraine were an “endeavour that we want to continue to be involved in”, or whether it should abandon the process.
