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US envoy Steve Witkoff will hold talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday on American proposals to end Russia’s war in Ukraine as the Kremlin claimed to have seized the frontline stronghold of Pokrovsk.
On the eve of negotiations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed Russian forces had seized Pokrovsk, a town in Donetsk province that they fought to take for well over a year while sustaining enormous casualties, as well as Vovchansk in Kharkiv.
Peskov said Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top military commander, had reported the gains to the Russian president during a visit to a command post on Monday.
Gerasimov has made inflated assertions about Russian gains before, including the alleged encirclement of Pokrovsk. Andriy Kovalenko, an official in Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, dismissed the Russian claims as a “cognitive show” aimed at impressing US negotiators.
Witkoff’s visit to Moscow is his sixth this year but the first in which he will not be alone: joining him will be Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has taken on a more active advisory role in the peace talks since he helped broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Steve Witkoff, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and Jared Kushner during a meeting with Ukrainian officials in Florida © Terry Renna/AP
Russian officials have said they are open to discussing a peace plan drawn up by Witkoff with Russian input widely seen as highly favourable to Moscow. But they have resisted a revised, shorter version that incorporates changes from Ukrainian officials during talks with American negotiators in Geneva last month.
The full terms of that revised plan have not been revealed and there remains a gulf between Kyiv and Moscow on territorial concessions and postwar security guarantees.
A major sticking point is Russia’s insistence that Ukrainian forces give up the remaining one-fifth of Donetsk province they still hold nearly four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Kyiv insists that any negotiation on territory must begin from the current line of control, a point Trump himself made after his October meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukrainian officials are concerned that Witkoff will again side with Moscow during this week’s talks.
“It has happened many times where we had co-ordinated our position with the US and then Witkoff goes to Moscow and, after seeing Putin, Trump puts out a statement that takes us back to square one,” said a senior Ukrainian official.
Vladimir Putin during a visit to a Russian command post on Monday © Kremlin.ru/Reuters
During a phone call with Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov, Witkoff agreed that Ukraine’s surrender of the rest of Donetsk was a prerequisite for a deal, according to a leaked recording of the conversation reported by Bloomberg.
Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces has not responded directly to Russia’s claims to have captured Pokrovsk. But on Tuesday morning it said that over the past 24 hours some “226 combat clashes took place along the front” including “78 attacks by Russian invaders [that] were repelled in the Pokrovsk direction”.
Deep State, a Ukrainian analytical group close to the defence ministry that tracks the frontline, said on Monday evening that the “situation remains critical” in and around Pokrovsk but that the battle for the stronghold and its satellite city of Myrnohrad continued.
Russian forces were “trying to establish physical control” in contested areas, it said, while laying mines and military obstacles and staging ambushes.
The Centre for Defence Strategies (CDS), a Kyiv-based security think-tank, said that Russian forces control at least half of Pokrovsk. “The enemy has an advantage in manpower and is attempting to accumulate assault infantry” around the city, it wrote in a briefing Monday evening.
CDS said that pressure from three sides was forcing Ukrainian forces in Myrnohrad “to withdraw to avoid encirclement”.
“Russian forces are advancing slowly but have not been able to fully capture Pokrovsk, even though they entered the city more than 120 days ago,” it said.