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Vladimir Putin has agreed to talk. That is the whole concession so far. After a three-hour meeting with US envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg on Wednesday, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Russia is "in principle" ready to restart trilateral talks with the US and Ukraine around 10 November, possibly in Abu Dhabi. Ushakov said the talks were meant to resume weeks ago, until Ukrainian strikes on Russia on the day of the Russian parliamentary elections got them cancelled.
The order of the trip matters. On Tuesday Witkoff met Zelenskyy in Oslo, with the Norwegian and Finnish leaders, European national security advisers and a senior aide to Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at the table, according to the Financial Times. A US official said Witkoff and Jared Kushner proposed a technical-level trilateral meeting. Ukraine accepted in Oslo. Russia accepted in St Petersburg.
European governments want more than a briefing afterwards. They are pushing for a step-by-step process that starts with working groups on specific issues and brings leaders in only later. A Commission spokesperson put it simply: what is important is that Europe is "sitting at the table". Julie Wilhelmsen of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs reads Oslo as the start of a second diplomatic track, with Europe's role being to hammer out the many detailed issues in lower-level groups.
Moscow is not impressed. Ushakov said the Oslo talks produced little that was useful, and that the European representatives presented "new approaches" without much substance.
Putin opened the meeting by releasing Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American held for more than four years after Russian troops seized him in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Trump said no swap was involved. Witkoff called Putin "a humanitarian", and was criticised for it by Republican senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis. Axios reports that Trump has also agreed to lift sanctions on Russian diesel sales, a step Moscow welcomed.
The German daily FAZ was blunt about the exchange. Its commentator Reinhard Veser wrote that Putin offered only diplomatic courtesies, thanking Trump for his interest in resolving the crisis, while Witkoff thanked him profusely for concrete favours, including the diesel decision. Putin also floated a Trump meeting in China in mid-November and offered to help with Iran.
The result on the ground was grim. Russia struck Kyiv within hours of the announcement, and a high-rise in the Sviatoshynskyi district was hit, killing two people, according to Ukraine's emergency service. Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center told the FT that Moscow is betting that winter strikes on Ukraine's energy grid will weaken Kyiv and push Europeans to carry a heavier financial load. Until that bet plays out, he argued, Russia has little reason to make real concessions.
The EU is trying to show it will not follow Washington's lead. After the Trump-Putin diesel arrangement, von der Leyen said it was unacceptable to use it as a pretext to ease sanctions. "Of course, we supported President Trump's energy ceasefire," she said on 16 October, "but we've seen that Russia did not respect it, not a single minute." European Council president António Costa told Zelenskyy that this was "no time to relieve Russia's sanctions". The Commission president has again ruled out suspending the EU's energy sanctions, despite pressure from Washington.
Kyiv itself wants a trilateral meeting with Putin and Trump, which Russia rejects for now. Zelenskyy says Moscow backs a meeting of negotiating teams no later than early November.
Europe is in the room in Oslo and absent in St Petersburg, and the decisions that matter are made where it is not. Washington has traded visible goodwill, a released prisoner and softer diesel rules, for a promise to talk, and Moscow has given nothing that costs it. The EU's leverage is money and sanctions, and it has said it will keep both. If a technical-level meeting does take place around 10 November, watch who sits behind the European nameplate, and whether the Commission and the Nordic states are in the working groups or only in the corridor. That will show whether "a seat at the table" means influence or just attendance.
