US envoys meet Zelensky in Oslo as Washington retreats from its own sanctions law
Rubio calls claims that pulled support kills Ukrainians scandalous while interceptors sit unsigned and Kyiv gets no missile warnings
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Zelenskyy met with Witkoff and Kushner in Kyiv last month.Genya Savilov / AFP via Getty Images
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Men carry away the body of a one-year-old girl, killed by Russian drone strike outside Kharkiv on Monday, while sat in her stroller.Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was due to meet US negotiators in Oslo on Tuesday, with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb joining talks that Washington's own conduct has already framed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent the same days calling it "scandalous" to suggest Ukrainians are dying because the United States is withdrawing support.
The envoy lineup tells its own story. Trump's negotiators are his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff, who joined by videoconference; the two have so far produced no diplomatic solution to a war now in its fifth year. Norwegian state media confirmed the Oslo venue, and Zelensky had met both men in Kyiv a month earlier without result. On Monday, Trump told reporters that Zelensky should "get somebody else to negotiate" and that "Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven't been doing much" — a description of a country whose ballistic missiles struck the Ukrainian capital again on Sunday, the third recent attack for which Kyiv says it received no American early warning.
Rubio, speaking at the start of a trip to India, insisted nothing had changed. "There's nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine," he said, after a 45-minute call with Zelensky that the Ukrainian president described as "substantive," covering missile interceptors, attack warnings and restrictions on Starshield, the military version of the SpaceX service. Ukraine says the interceptor deliveries are being delayed without explanation. "All of this suggests that some political decision has been made to slow down support for us," Zelensky told a bipartisan Congressional delegation on Monday.
The timing sharpens the picture. Last week Trump suspended large parts of his own Russia sanctions law — the measure threatening 100 percent tariffs on buyers of Russian oil — three weeks before the midterm elections, after diesel prices began to hurt at home. European buyers had spent years complying with the same framework. NBC News describes an American pressure campaign on Kyiv running in parallel with moves aimed at courting the Kremlin, leaving both Congress and US allies questioning whether Washington can still mediate at all.
On Monday, officials in the Kharkiv region published images of a one-year-old girl killed with her mother in a Russian drone strike on a public park, the child still in her stroller. "The world has enough strength to stop the war," Zelensky wrote. "That strength must finally be used — against the murderers."