Witkoff Due in St. Petersburg for Talks With Putin as Trump Urges Zelensky to Make a Deal

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to arrive in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine, two sources told Reuters. Witkoff is traveling from Norway, where he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other officials on Tuesday.

Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev will take part in the meeting and was expected to meet Witkoff at the airport, Reuters reported. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said Ukraine would be the main focus of the talks, though he said it was unclear whether any agreement would be reached.

The meeting comes a day after President Donald Trump urged Ukraine to agree peace terms with Russia. Trump urged Ukraine on Tuesday to make a deal to settle the conflict, and said Moscow wanted to get it done, Reuters reported. Relations between the United States and Ukraine have come under severe strain, with Zelenskyy reporting a hiatus in advance warnings of missile strikes and limitations on Elon Musk’s Starshield system, according to Reuters.

Overnight strikes kill four as energy grid targeted

Hours before Witkoff’s expected arrival, overnight Russian attacks killed four people in Ukraine, officials said. Two Ukrainians over 80 years old were among the dead, according to Reuters, which reported that two people died in the capital Kyiv, where a drone slammed into an apartment building, and that an 83-year-old man and an 81-year-old woman were killed outside the northeastern city of Kharkiv, citing Ukrainian police.

Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi said Russia had attacked power facilities in the Kyiv, Volyn, Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, as well as civilian enterprises in at least two others. A university building and shopping centre in central Ukraine were also struck, while injuries were reported in the Poltava, Lviv, Cherkassy and Chernihiv regions, he said.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had hit a warehouse complex used for drone storage in the central Ukrainian city of Poltava, an electric power substation that supplies power to Ukraine’s defence and industrial sector as well as logistics centres in Kyiv, and a ship carrying military cargo to Ukraine that was heading to the port of Odesa. The strikes are part of a mounting campaign by Moscow to knock out the Ukrainian energy grid as winter approaches, according to Reuters.

The governor of the Leningrad region surrounding St. Petersburg said on Wednesday that Russian forces had shot down three drones over the region, according to Reuters.

Reporting based on coverage by Reuters and AnewZ.