Putin Pledges to Protect Witkoff and Kushner as US Envoys Arrive in Moscow
Russian president personally guarantees the safety of Trump's two senior envoys as they arrive in the Russian capital for talks, with Kremlin representative welcoming them as "peacemakers"
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged on Saturday that Russia will do everything possible to ensure the safety of ongoing peace talks and of the two senior American mediators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as the Washington Post confirmed that the two envoys arrived in Moscow on Saturday for talks aimed at revitalizing peace negotiations, with Kremlin representative Kirill Dmitriev greeting them on arrival with the words: "Welcome to Moscow Peacemakers."
"Russia will do everything possible to ensure the safety of the talks and of mediators Witkoff and Kushner," Putin said, delivering a personal security guarantee for Trump's two most senior diplomatic envoys at a moment when the Iran war and its regional spillover have created an elevated security environment across the entire Middle East and beyond.
Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Moscow on Saturday in a visit aimed at revitalizing peace talks to end Russia's war against Ukraine, met by Russian representative Kirill Dmitriev, who posted on X:
"Welcome to Moscow, Peacemakers."
The Moscow visit is the latest in a series of high-level engagements between the Trump administration's senior envoys and Russian officials on the Ukraine peace file. Witkoff and Kushner have previously met Putin in Moscow in December 2025, participated in the Abu Dhabi trilateral talks in January and February 2026, and attended the Geneva talks in February 2026, building a sustained diplomatic relationship with the Kremlin that has given them more direct access to Putin than any previous American diplomatic team since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
Putin's personal pledge to protect the mediators carries a significance that extends beyond standard diplomatic protocol. The Iran war has created a volatile regional security environment in which American officials operating in the broader Middle East and adjacent theaters face elevated risks from Iran-aligned forces and their proxies. Putin's explicit guarantee of the envoys' safety in Moscow, delivered publicly, places Russia's presidential authority behind the protection of an American diplomatic mission on Russian soil, a statement that reinforces Moscow's claim to a constructive role in the broader peace architecture even as it simultaneously rejects Washington's requests to pressure Iran on the Strait of Hormuz.
The timing of the Witkoff-Kushner Moscow visit is notable. It comes one week after CIA Director John Ratcliffe made his own surprise unannounced visit to Moscow on a US military transport aircraft, a visit that the Kremlin confirmed produced no direct contact with Putin and that two senior Iranian sources said ended with Russia rejecting Washington's request to pressure Tehran on Hormuz. The Witkoff-Kushner visit, arriving at a different level and through established diplomatic channels rather than intelligence back-channels, represents Washington's continuing engagement with Moscow on multiple tracks simultaneously, using different envoys for different objectives within the same overarching diplomatic framework.
The Trump administration is simultaneously drafting a post-war Middle East strategy built on Iran containment and expanded normalization, as Axios reported on Friday, September 4, 2026. Russia's role as a potential security guarantor of that broader regional order, as well as a party to the Ukraine peace process that Witkoff and Kushner are managing, makes Moscow a central and unavoidable variable in the diplomatic architecture Trump is attempting to construct across both theaters simultaneously.