Stephen Witkoff's Diplomacy: A Chronology of All Meetings with Putin and Preparation for a New One
Kyiv • UNN
U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Witkoff will meet with Putin in Moscow on January 22 to receive a response to the peace plan. This will be the seventh meeting; the previous six did not yield significant results.
US President's Special Envoy Stephen Witkoff announced that he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, January 22. The Kremlin confirmed this information, UNN writes.
"We have to go meet him on Thursday."
As Reuters notes, Witkoff stated that he would travel to Moscow on Thursday with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, where they would meet with Putin.
"But it is the Russians who are asking for this meeting. I think this is an important statement on their part."
In early 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with Bloomberg that he hoped to receive Russia's response to a 20-point framework agreement by the end of January.
Chronology of all meetings between Witkoff and Putin and their results
Since Donald Trump's return to the White House in early 2025, Stephen Witkoff, the US Special Representative for Ukraine and the Middle East, has become a key link in unofficial and official contacts between Washington and the Kremlin.
Throughout 2025, Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin six times, which indicates an unprecedented intensity of negotiations that are taking place in parallel with the hostilities in Ukraine.
The first high-profile trip took place on March 13, 2025, when Witkoff arrived in Moscow. This meeting lasted more than 12 hours and ended late at night, marking the beginning of the development of the so-called "framework plan." But the meeting did not bring any real results.
The next round of negotiations took place on April 11, 2025, in St. Petersburg; then the parties discussed for more than four hours the conditions for a possible resumption of direct dialogue between Moscow and Kyiv. Following the April meeting, Kremlin representative Yuri Ushakov called the negotiations "constructive," but no real steps toward de-escalation took place.
In August 2025, diplomatic pressure intensified. On August 6, Witkoff again arrived in Moscow amid a "deadline" that the Trump administration had set for reaching a truce. The negotiations lasted three hours, and before them, Witkoff held an informal meeting with Kirill Dmitriev. Despite expectations of a breakthrough, the parties remained in their initial positions: Russia demanded recognition of the annexed territories, and the United States insisted on ending the hot phase of the war along the demarcation line.
The autumn series of visits focused on specifying the peace plan. The initial document contained 28 points, including limiting the size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Ukraine's neutral status. However, after consultations with European allies and Kyiv in Geneva, the plan was transformed into a 20-point version. The last round in 2025 took place on December 2 in Moscow. Witkoff arrived with Jared Kushner. The meeting lasted about five hours, but the parties did not come closer to a compromise. Putin continued to demand all of Donbas and continued his mantra about the "illegitimacy of the Ukrainian leadership."
Now, on January 21, 2026, the situation is entering a new phase. After "very positive" talks with Kirill Dmitriev in Davos, Witkoff is preparing for a meeting with Putin, scheduled for January 22 at the initiative of the Russian side. As Bloomberg notes, this visit is critical, as Russia must provide an official response to the updated US peace plan received in early January.
The expectation of an "important statement" from the Kremlin against the backdrop of the previous six rounds indicates that the long negotiation process may finally end either with a concrete agreement or with the conflict entering a new stage of protracted confrontation. All previous times, Putin simply played diplomacy so as not to be accused of "disrupting peace." In practice, there were no shifts. The head of Russia continued to kill Ukrainians after each meeting.