A chair for Europe, a warning about its soldiers: the next round of talks gets bigger

Two days ago, the question was whether Europe would get a seat. On Thursday night, the US envoys said it would. After meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Jared Kushner said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to expand the next round of negotiations to include European countries¹. “We cannot conclude this deal without Europeans being at the table,” he said, adding that Putin was “willing to give it a try”². Steve Witkoff called it “a very big deal”, without saying which countries would take part or in what capacity³.

The other half of the picture came from Moscow. Putin warned Europe not to send peacekeeping troops into Ukraine after any deal, calling that a “continuation of war”, and refused to soften his territorial demands¹. He said Washington should work with its allies so they could “finally make up their minds as to what they want: peace or war in Ukraine”¹. France 24 notes that the Kremlin itself did not confirm that Putin had agreed to include Europe².

In Dublin, Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the change. Europeans would no longer sit “separately” on the sidelines as in Abu Dhabi, he said: “They will have a voice”². He hopes the agenda will include “some kind of ceasefires”¹. An EU official told AFP that representatives of five European capitals and the European Commission also met the envoys². Kushner said the US was working towards “the largest prisoner exchange of the war”¹.

The fighting did not pause for the diplomacy. A Russian drone strike killed two people in Sumy region, five people were injured in Rivne when a drone hit an apartment building, and a man was killed in Russia’s Belgorod region, local officials said¹.

For you: a wider table is slower, and that is not a flaw. Security arrangements that Europeans must pay for and staff are better argued with them in the room than handed to them afterwards. Watch for a date, a list of names and a prisoner count; those are the parts that can be checked.