US President Donald Trump's outgoing Ukraine envoy said a deal to end the Ukraine war was "really close" and depended on resolving just two major issues but the Kremlin said there had to be radical changes to some of the US proposals.

The Kremlin on Sunday welcomed US President Donald Trump's move to stop calling Russia a direct threat and said his new national security strategy, which portrays European powers as in decline, largely accorded with Russia's own perceptions.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Russia and the United States were making progress in peace talks on Ukraine and that Moscow was ready to continue working with the current U.S. team.

President Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff will travel next week to Moscow as momentum builds for a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.

Ukrainian negotiators who met Mr Zelensky in Dublin on December 2nd to debrief him were unsurprised that the Moscow talks fizzled out. “We have lots of convergence with the US ,” said Sergiy Kyslytsya,

​The Kremlin said on Friday that ‍Moscow was awaiting a response ‍from Washington following talks between president Vladimir Putin ‌and US representatives earlier this week ⁠in the Russian ‌capital.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday that Russia's recent battlefield progress in Ukraine had what he described as a positive impact on peace negotiations held with U.S. envoys in Moscow a day earlier.

US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will join US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin in Moscow for talks on resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Kremlin said Tuesday. "The Russian-American meeting will begin after 5:00 pm (1400 GMT).

LONDON -- The White House said it's is "very optimistic" ahead of special envoy Steve Witkoff's meeting in Moscow on Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as U.S. officials continue their push to end Russia's war against Ukraine.

Once again there is an impasse in the attempts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. A five-hour meeting in the Kremlin between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the US team led by Donald Trump’s envoys, businessmen Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, has failed to make any significant progress.

During former U.S. President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, the phrase "new Cold War" was often used to describe relations between the United States and Russia — especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine and Biden promised military aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.