Donald Trump’s fixer-in-law: Jared Kushner returns to push Russia-Ukraine deal
The US president has put a trusted family man at the centre of his mission to end the Kremlin’s war
Stuck in a drab Geneva conference room discussing painful compromises to end a war, Ukrainian officials last Sunday could not help but notice the US delegate furiously tapping away at his laptop.
“I was kind of surprised to see Jared [Kushner] at first . . . but then I appreciated his mood,” said Sergiy Kyslytsya, one of the Ukrainian ministers in the room. This was Donald Trump’s son-in-law, his unofficial envoy and general foreign policy fixer — and he was busy taking notes about Ukraine.
Kushner, who married the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump in 2009, has long carried the weight of some of his father-in-law’s most impossible diplomatic missions.
During Trump’s first term, Kushner led the president’s push for Arab states to normalise ties with Israel. More recently he was called on to help broker a deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Now his task is to silence the guns and drones on the front lines in the Donbas. Kushner did not respond to a request for an interview for this article.
Kushner’s entry into one of the thorniest diplomatic manoeuvres of Trump’s second term — an effort to end Russia’s brutal land war in Ukraine — is part of the president’s plan to replicate the breakthrough in Gaza.
There, a 20-point plan bearing the US president’s name led to a fragile peace between Israel and Hamas and the release of remaining Israeli hostages.
After that deal, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, and Kushner, turned to Ukraine. The double act went to work behind the scenes, producing an initial draft text that Kyiv’s European allies feared was so close to Russia’s demands that it amounted to capitulation.
Next week, the diplomatic duo may fly to see Vladimir Putin in the hopes of “finalising” the peace plan, Trump said on Tuesday.
It will be Witkoff’s first meeting with Russia’s leader in the Kremlin with another Trump envoy by his side.
Trump said: “Steve Witkoff is going over maybe with Jared. I’m not sure about Jared going, but he’s involved in the process, smart guy, and they’re going to be meeting with President Putin.”
Despite his scant background in the region, Kushner’s involvement is “on balance, a good thing”, said Philip Gordon, who served as national security adviser to former vice-president Kamala Harris. “Like Witkoff, he clearly has the trust and confidence of the president, which is a requirement of any successful negotiator.”
“Unlike Witkoff, he has experience with diplomacy,” Gordon added.
Kushner’s turn as a peacemaker this year has been unexpected. When Trump returned to the White House, his son-in-law — who served as an adviser in the president’s first term — insisted he would steer clear of government.
Kushner said his main focus was on his private equity start-up Affinity Partners, which he incorporated the day after Trump left office in 2021. Six months later, he secured a $2bn investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
The fund has been the subject of a Democrat-led Congressional investigation seeking to probe any overlap between Kushner’s business dealings and his time in government. Kushner has dismissed the investigations as politically motivated.
“My main focus is on Affinity so I no longer envision taking an active role in those discussions,” he told Financial Times in January when asked about the administration’s efforts to expand Trump’s Abraham accords, which established diplomatic ties between Israel and four Arab states.
“I do think I could be helpful to Steve so I am here to give advice, if needed,” he said.
Kushner and Witkoff, a longtime friend and golfing partner of the president, are a generation apart but close, said a US official familiar with their dynamic. Witkoff in February said the president’s son-in-law had “convinced” him to take the job as Trump’s envoy. The pair would often call each other to bounce ideas around, a person familiar with them said.
The president trusts his son-in-law’s diplomatic nous.
“We always bring Jared when we want to get that deal closed,” Trump said in a speech to the Israeli parliament in October, as Kushner watched from a balcony. “We need that brain on occasion.”
The Kushner playbook in Gaza is the Trump administration’s model for its peace efforts in Ukraine.
There were “more differences than similarities” between the Gaza and Ukraine conflict, said Gordon. Nonetheless, he said: “I think their takeaway was, you put something on paper and say ‘all right guys, this is Trump’s plan, now let’s get serious, you’re taking it’, and it works.”
A leaked transcript of a call last month — days after the Gaza deal — between Witkoff and Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov laid bare the administration’s attempts to replicate the approach in Gaza.
“Maybe we set out like a 20-point peace proposal, just like we did in Gaza,” Witkoff said, according to the transcript Bloomberg published. The FT has not verified the transcript.
Kushner was brought in to help draft the next collection of bullet points.
“He’s very good at this, he’s very good at putting pen to paper,” said the US official.
He and Witkoff had input from Russian officials including Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — a fact that has raised some alarm in European capitals.
A graduate of the Harvard Business School, Dmitriev’s connection with the president’s son-in-law stretches back to Trump’s first administration. The men first met in Montreux in 2019, on the shores of Lake Geneva, to talk big-picture diplomacy in the Middle East.
The approach to the latest peace plan has raised some concerns about how Trump — not for the first time — is entrusting the gravest matters of geopolitics to a trusted coterie, including family.
“There’s no formal policy co-ordination mechanism alive anymore,” said a former US defence official. “It really comes down to policy by personality.”