Russian missiles hit Kyiv hours after Moscow agrees in principle to resume peace talks, and Zelensky says he would freeze the war at the front line

The missiles arrived while the diplomats were still talking. Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said Russian missiles struck the capital on Wednesday night, injuring six people and damaging several houses, hours after Moscow announced it was ready in principle to restart negotiations to end the war. The attack was the second act of a day that had opened with the most hopeful diplomatic language in months.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff spent about three hours with President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Wednesday, with Jared Kushner joining by video link. The day before, Witkoff had met President Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo alongside the leaders of Norway and Finland, and Zelensky said those talks covered security guarantees for Ukraine and proposals for an energy ceasefire. Witkoff called the St Petersburg meeting constructive. President Donald Trump said the parties may now be closer than ever to ending the war.

Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov said another round of trilateral talks involving Russia, Ukraine and the United States could take place around November 10 in Abu Dhabi, focused on a security system for both countries after the war ends. Then he poured cold water on the same idea. The new approaches Witkoff had brought from the Europeans and Kyiv "contained little of actual value for resolving the Ukrainian crisis," Ushakov said, and he repeated Putin's claim that Russian forces hold the initiative along the front. Ukraine and its European allies describe the battlefield instead as largely stalled.

Zelensky, in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, repeated the furthest position Kyiv has put on the table. Asked whether he would halt the fighting where the lines now stand, with Ukraine holding 75 percent or more of its country, he said yes. "Right now we have to freeze, and I think this is a real way to end this war. We call it a ceasefire. President Trump called it freeze and stop," he said. A freeze is the minimum Ukraine needs from Russia today, he said, and ceding the whole Donbas would not be fair. The step after a freeze is security guarantees from the United States and Europe, so that occupation and aggression do not return. "I always said that we are open to negotiate in any format, any topics, but don't speak about us without us, please," he said.

Three way talks have been stalled since February. In the months since, Russia has increased its strikes on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure while Ukraine has faced shortages of Western supplied interceptors. Russia launched its full scale invasion in 2022 and now controls roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory. Wednesday showed both tracks running at once: an envoy in the Kremlin talking about November, and missiles over Kyiv the same night.