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 to obtain up to 100 fighter jets; and in Madrid, he held talks on cooperation 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 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-organizing a large-scale criminal scheme, and two ministers have resigned.
The scandal threatens to widen, with some EU leaders warning Zelensky needs to tackle corruption more effectively before they decide on unblocking a €140bn (£121bn) loan for Kyiv, based on frozen Russian state assets.
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 stated that Russia's conditions for a peace deal had not changed since Putin outlined them in 2024. These include guaranteeing that Kyiv renounces any ambition to join NATO and a full withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions.
Zelensky has consistently argued that withdrawing from Donetsk and Luhansk—collectively known as the Donbas—would leave the rest of the country vulnerable to future attacks.
A long meeting with Putin in April saw Witkoff 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— including discussions between Trump and Putin—efforts to bring about a ceasefire have stalled.
At one point, a potential Trump-Putin summit in Budapest was scrapped after the US learned that Moscow had no intention of conceding on demands that were unacceptable to Kyiv.
Nevertheless, contact between US and Russian officials has continued under the radar, with reports of Putin's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev meeting Witkoff in Washington in late October, shortly after Trump imposed sanctions on Russia's two largest oil companies.
