Trump Sends Pentagon Officials to Ukraine in Effort to Restart Peace Talks

The push comes after the White House has seen multiple previous overtures to Moscow yield little progress on halting the war.

President Trump dispatched a high-level Pentagon delegation to Kyiv for talks Wednesday in the administration’s latest attempt to revive negotiations on halting Ukraine’s war with Russia, according to senior U.S. officials.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, sits before a lunch with President Donald Trump, from right, Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this year. (File photo.)(AP)

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, along with two four-star Army generals, was scheduled to hold discussions with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials, as well as top military and industry representatives, two of the officials said. Driscoll is planning to meet with Russian officials at a later date.

The White House decision to turn to Driscoll and senior military officers is driven in part by the belief that Moscow might be more open to military-brokered negotiations and by frustration that multiple previous attempts have yielded little.

“Secretary Driscoll is traveling to Ukraine to get a sense of facts on the ground. He will participate in meetings in Ukraine and report his findings back to the White House,” said a senior administration official. “The president has been clear that it is time to stop the killing and make a deal to end the war.”

Driscoll’s mission is to restart peace talks on Trump’s behalf, another of the officials said.

Driscoll’s boss, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, hasn’t visited Kyiv since taking office in January. The decision to send the civilian head of the Army, whose job is focused mainly on training and equipping soldiers, is unusual. But Trump often relies on unorthodox emissaries, including former real-estate developer Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy.

It isn’t clear whether Driscoll was sharing a new negotiating proposal with Zelensky from the White House, which has previously called for freezing the two sides’ troops along current battle lines in eastern Ukraine to jump-start talks on a settlement.

The idea of sending Driscoll, a Yale Law School classmate of Vice President JD Vance, to Ukraine and later to Russia came out of a conversation between Trump and Vance, according to one of the officials.

The Trump administration has attempted multiple times to bring the conflict launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 to an end through a negotiated settlement. But Ukrainian and Russian officials haven’t held direct talks for months, and U.S. efforts reached a stalemate since the summit between Trump and Putin in Alaska in August. Russia has shown little interest in halting the war except on its own terms.

In October, Trump canceled a planned follow-up meeting with Putin in Budapest after Russian government officials made clear they had no intention of making a deal. Trump imposed new sanctions on Russia’s oil companies last month after abandoning a planned summit with Putin in Budapest.

The White House initiative comes amid an escalation of heavy Russian drone and missile attacks across Ukraine in recent weeks, and as Moscow reports territorial gains in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.

The U.S. delegation in Kyiv, which includes Gen. Chris Donahue, the top U.S. Army commander in Europe, and Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, was expected to discuss developments on the battlefield and weapons production while in Ukraine, in addition to ideas for halting the war.

Donahue has been a key figure in sending weapons to Ukraine, dating back to his time as the commander of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps in 2022 when it formed a unit to help coordinate military aid to Kyiv.

Trump at the White House on Tuesday indicated he was still hopeful that he could stop the fighting. “I’ve actually stopped eight wars. I have another one to go with Putin. I’m a little surprised at Putin. It is taken longer than I thought.”

Driscoll has led an effort to revamp the Army’s decades-old acquisition system. Trump called Driscoll a “killer” in an Oval Office announcement that he was deploying the National Guard to Memphis, Tenn., and refers to him as “the drone guy,” a reference to Driscoll’s focus on fielding a million new drones for the Army. Along with his position as Army Secretary, Trump named Driscoll to lead the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

Witkoff, who has been the administration’s point man on negotiations with the Kremlin, helped prepare Driscoll for the talks in Kyiv, one of the officials said. The two know each other from working on Trump’s presidential campaign.

Driscoll and George flew to Germany on Monday, where they received intelligence briefings at a U.S. military base with Donahue, the officials said. The group discussed the battlefield over maps with soldiers who have been working on Ukraine for years. They then flew to Poland on Tuesday and boarded an overnight train for Kyiv late Tuesday night.

Few senior U.S. officials have visited Ukraine since Trump returned to the White House. Hegseth granted permission for the senior Army officials to visit, as military members cannot enter the country without defense secretary approval, one of the officials said.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com