Witkoff and Kushner Brief Zelensky Near Dublin After Putin Talks, and Zelensky Says Europeans Will Get a Seat

The US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at Casement Aerodrome in Baldonnel, west of Dublin, on Thursday evening, hours after talks with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Zelensky said afterwards that Russia had accepted a prisoner exchange and that Europeans would have a voice in the next round of negotiations, though no one has published a detailed readout.

The meeting began shortly before 9pm and lasted just under an hour, according to PA as carried in the Irish Times live blog. Ukrainska Pravda, republished by Yahoo News, put the meeting on the evening of 12 November and said the envoys hope European representatives will join the next round of talks to end the war.

What happened in Moscow before the Dublin meeting?

Witkoff and Kushner met Putin at the Senate Palace in the Kremlin earlier on Thursday, according to Time. Russian state media said the talks lasted more than two hours, the Irish Times reported. Time quoted the Kremlin foreign-policy adviser Yuri Ushakov as saying Putin will continue talks with Donald Trump at the APEC summit in China later this month, and reported that Putin told the envoys foreign peacekeeping troops in Ukraine would be a continuation of the war. The Digest reported the earlier Putin meeting with the envoys on Thursday.

What did Zelensky say about the prisoner exchange and Europe?

Zelensky said Russia had accepted a prisoner exchange, which he called a real result, the Irish Times reported. He said the Americans had also made progress on getting European representatives into the negotiations next week, adding that they will have a voice. Kushner said the US side had argued for including Europeans, and Witkoff said the envoys were working hard for Trump to end the war but gave no detail on progress, the same report said. Time reported that a prisoner swap was agreed by negotiators in Abu Dhabi and gave no numbers; the figures have not been published in the sources reviewed here.

What is happening at the Dublin summit?

The meeting took place on the margins of the ninth European Political Community summit at the Convention Centre Dublin, hosted by Taoiseach Micheál Martin, with about 50 leaders attending, the Irish Times said. Martin said there could be no progress on European security without European input and that he would await the outcome of the Zelensky meeting. An informal meeting of EU leaders is due at the same venue on Friday.

The open points are who will represent Europe at the table next week, in what format, and whether the prisoner exchange is carried out on the timetable Zelensky implied. Neither Washington nor Moscow had given its own account of the Dublin meeting at the time of writing.