But in the tangled mess that is the war in Ukraine, all of those gestures benefit Russia most — leaving a ceasefire, let alone peace, a distant prospect for besieged Ukrainians, and the Trump administration and U.S. Republicans still grappling with high diesel and gasoline prices ahead of the midterm elections.

To win effusive praise from Witkoff and announce a resumption in negotiations, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to do very little: release Stephen Hubbard, a detainee of little value, and then overcome an obstacle of Russia’s own making: professed grievances over Ukraine’s stepped-up drone and missile strikes that coincided with Russia’s parliamentary elections in September.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not disguise his dismay — or his cynicism about the diplomatic developments — as he used the latest Russian strikes on Kyiv to throw shade at Witkoff for praising Putin as a “humanitarian.”

“Three waves of ballistic strikes were launched by Russian ‘humanitarians’ against Kyiv from the evening,” Zelensky said. “They used 21 missiles. Unfortunately, there is a significant number of hits and damages in the city: ordinary houses, energy facilities, infrastructure of one of the stations and the metro, shopping centers, and enterprises. Among the damaged objects is even a monastery.”

“Twelve of our regions were under Russian strikes this night,” he continued. “In Kyiv and the regions, 34 people were injured, including five children. As of now, two deaths are known.”

Zelensky added: “Essentially immediately after the latest negotiations, Russia delivered a demonstrative strike. This means that there are no real changes in its attitude towards everything that is happening. It is important to continue trying to find the right solutions to end this war.”

As Kyiv and Moscow maneuvered for Washington’s favor Wednesday, Zelensky reiterated his willingness to freeze the fighting along current battle lines — a proposal that Trump had made just over a year ago and that Russia rejected, insisting that Ukraine surrender the entirety of its eastern Donetsk region, including the so-called “fortress” cities that Russia has tried and failed to capture for years.

Following Witkoff’s visit to St. Petersburg on Wednesday, high-ranking Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said the U.S. envoy’s points were so convincing that Moscow reconsidered its opposition to meeting a Ukrainian delegation and was willing to send delegates to Abu Dhabi in mid-November for technical talks, the first since February.

Ushakov said that Witkoff had informed Putin of the results of his talks with Zelensky in Oslo, adding there was little “substance” to the “new elements” of Ukrainian and European proposals. Ushakov said that he did not know how close the war was to ending but that “it is heading that way.”

Experts and analysts, especially in Ukraine, were less convinced.

“As experience shows, the mere fact that negotiations are taking place does not mean that a peace agreement is likely to be reached anytime soon,” Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko said in an interview. “It is more likely that the war will escalate at the same time, particularly the air war against Ukraine.”

“Russia’s attacks on Kyiv and Ukraine will be used as a tool to exert pressure on the negotiations,” he continued. “This is Putin’s preferred method. That is why I say that negotiations and an escalation of the war will take place simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and chair of the committee on foreign policy and interparliamentary relations, described the talks as “a charade.”

“Russia is using the negotiations as a propaganda tool — that’s all — while we are trying to work with the Europeans and have some discussions and so on,” he said. “But there are no results anymore, and there won’t be any, unfortunately.”

Tatiana Stanovaya, a political scientist and fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on X that while Witkoff’s readout generated little enthusiasm in Moscow, recent sanctions relief and Trump’s latest shift toward Russia “have given Putin sufficient grounds to agree to resume negotiations, particularly as doing so comes at little cost to Moscow.”

“It is prepared to engage in discussions for tactical gains, calculating that these, combined with the further deterioration of the Ukrainian state, may eventually produce a strategic shift in Russia’s favour,” Stanovaya wrote.

Other Russian officials have called the latest meeting with Trump’s envoys a sign that “Washington shares the assessment” about the lack of substance in what Kyiv and its European backers have proposed.

Russia has long sought Trump’s support for a negotiated end to the war that would deliver victory to Putin by allowing him to seize all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

“The talks … are undoubtedly a prelude to a potential diplomatic breakthrough,” Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky said. “The latest meeting has, in effect, brought the issue of a settlement in Ukraine back onto the negotiating track.”

The talks are set to include military officers and Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister now known for his revisionist history books about Ukraine. Putin, meanwhile, will head to China, where he is working to set up a joint meeting with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

That’s a format that the Russian leader has long seemed to prefer, in which he can push to end the war on his terms while bypassing Ukraine and Europe.

The idea of such a big-power summit has alarmed Ukrainian officials, with Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha writing on X: “A trilateral ‌meeting between ⁠the leaders of Ukraine, the US, and Russia could help end the war sooner. A trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, China, and the US would do only the opposite: encourage Putin to continue this war.”

During his meeting with Putin, Witkoff hailed the diesel deal Trump struck with the Russian leader as “another example of what we can achieve by working together.”

The deal, which removes sanctions from Russia in a reversal of long-standing U.S. policy, is intended to lower fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections.

Putin has claimed that it lowered global diesel prices by 5 percent to 6 percent, a figure energy experts dispute. The amount of diesel Russia is releasing is marginal compared with overall U.S. usage and hardly enough to address the global energy crisis set off by the U.S. war with Iran.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said the first tanker with diesel bound for the U.S. was set to depart Thursday, even though the contract for the supplies has yet to be signed.

“This tanker will have a capacity of 40,000 tons,” Novak said. “And, certainly, further shipments will follow.”

To ship diesel to the U.S., Russia had to lift its own export embargo, imposed after systematic Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out some of the country’s largest oil refineries, creating shortages and price spikes for Russians.

Those strikes forced Russia to prioritize its domestic market, ration fuel at home and even temporarily permit the sale of lower-grade fuels to stabilize domestic availability.

Novak hinted that production limits were still in place and that the destination for diesel shipments will depend on “what volumes we can supply — over and above the needs of the United States.”

Details aside, the deal has given Putin a basis to push one of his mainstay talking points: that the West is hurting itself by imposing economic sanctions on Russia and ultimately won’t be able to meet its own needs without resuming purchases of Russian fossil fuels.

For Putin, who is also aware that Trump may flip positions again after the midterm elections, the current thaw with Washington creates an opportunity to improve ties with the U.S. while pushing ahead with a plan to make winter the most miserable yet for Ukraine in the nearly five-year-long invasion.

The Kremlin seems to hope that will break Ukraine’s resolve and European support for Kyiv will collapse.

But for Russia, there is also a risk of overplaying its hand, said Vladimir Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist.

“The Putin regime will never have a more favorable opportunity to extricate itself from this war than it does right now,” Pastukhov said. “The frantic, restless way Putin is acting suggests he may, in part, grasp this. But hubris — the eternal nemesis of Russian emperors — stands in the way.”

Pastukhov said Trump appears to have moved away from a belief that freezing the fighting would be the best way to end the war quickly and is instead mulling a solution “in the manner of a gangland showdown.”

“In any case, I believe that this is no ordinary moment in the history of this war … but a true point of no return, a juncture where an intense struggle is underway over the terms of peace,” Pastukhov said.

“In all likelihood, this round of ping-pong will prove inconclusive; what happens next will depend on whether Trump is capable of moving from hints to action — that is, whether he will risk openly siding with Putin in this war, thereby forcing Europe — and, along with it, Zelensky — to capitulate.”

In Ukraine, trust in U.S. support has already evaporated.

After Trump cut off direct military and financial aid, the three key remaining areas of U.S. assistance — intelligence sharing, Starlink satellite internet service and arms sales — each proved vulnerable during the past week, as the White House seemed to pressure Kyiv.

Fesenko, the political scientist, cited “a crisis in bilateral relations.”

“This is evidenced by Trump’s very harsh, sometimes aggressive statements, including calls for a change of president in Ukraine,” he said. “The risks have therefore become apparent precisely in the remaining areas of cooperation.”

On Thursday, Ukrainian commanders were still reporting issues with Starshield, the military equivalent of Starlink, despite assertions by the Trump administration that service had been restored.

“Starshield continues to operate across all sectors of the front line, but with a speed limit of 160 km/h. This has created certain problems for us,” Andriy “Klima” Klymenko, commander of the 414th Unmanned Systems Brigade “Birds of Magyar,” told The Washington Post.

“The worst part is that nobody warned us that the restrictions were being introduced,” Klymenko said. “We found out about them in the middle of combat missions, when we started losing aircraft.”

“We have now adapted, but the problem has not gone away,” he added. “At lower speeds, our drones become easier targets for the enemy. This directly undermines the effectiveness of operations.”

Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.

AI Mode Conversation: 9/11 attacks investigations: approaches and hypotheses

For me, the New York City skyline was close to home. Quite literally. I grew up just across the Hudson River, with the famed skyline of America’s biggest city visible from my bedroom window. Being a Palestinian American living just outside of the world’s most famous city meant that I spent part of my summers as a tour guide for family visiting us from the Middle East, who, like so many people around the world, wanted to see the Big Apple that the movies and live broadcasts from Times Square on New Year’s Eve had made so famous.

I took visitors to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park and the World Trade Center. My last tour was in the final days of August 2001. We went to the observation deck of the World Trade Center known as “Top of the World”. Little did I know that two weeks later that deck, where we had stood looking out at the amazing metropolis below, would come crashing down along with the entire World Trade Center, killing thousands and instantly changing the world as we had known it.

By the time of the September 11 attacks, I was back in my dormitory at university in New England and huddled around a 10-inch television screen with floormates watching ABC’s Peter Jennings cover the horrific news as it was unfolding that Tuesday morning. Among the early reactions was one from Benjamin Netanyahu, then a former prime minister of Israel. Asked by The New York Times what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Netanyahu replied, “It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy,” adding that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples”. This was his response while ground zero was still smouldering after an attack that had killed nearly 3,000 people.

It immediately hit me that not only was the world about to change, but my life in the US as a Palestinian American was about to become far, far more complicated. The US was about to embark on military engagement in the Middle East, and Netanyahu was excited by the opportunity this presented Israel.

To better understand the impact this moment had on US-Israel relations, it is crucial to consider the preceding context. I have argued elsewhere that the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 was a complicated one for US-Israel relations. For most of the history of the US-Israel relationship, the Cold War was the defining paradigm in international relations. For Israel, this was an easy paradigm to navigate. It billed itself to Americans as a like-minded, US-aligned democracy confronting Soviet-backed satellite states in the Arab world.

But as the Cold War ended, the political landscape shifted. The Berlin Wall fell, democratisation swept Eastern Europe, and apartheid ended in South Africa, while Israel was brutally repressing the first Palestinian Intifada. Suddenly, Israel did not fit so comfortably in this new world order. It was during this period that the US made its greatest investments in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, however flawed, and used some leverage to press the Israeli government on settlement building.

September 11 and the ensuing global “war on terror” changed all of this. With the second Palestinian Intifada under way, the September 11 attacks on the US provided an opportunity to once again put Israel and the US on the same side of a new defining global divide. Instead of communism, the new global bad guy was radical Islam.

Netanyahu and his allies understood this very well, just as he made clear to The New York Times 25 years ago this week. A wounded America was primed for Islamophobic narratives, and pro-Israel voices were often happy to provide them, as they understood that an America obsessed with “counterterrorism” would have to stay close to Israel.

There are numerous areas where we see the impact of this over time: enhanced US-Israel intelligence collaboration, growing US financial support for Israel and legislative initiatives supported by Israel’s backers in the US that used broadened anti-terror authorities to crack down on Palestinians, to name a few.

The narratives that helped support these outcomes also went beyond simply linking Israel and the US through a common “terrorist threat”. Palestinians were also more easily turned into a “security problem” to American audiences. Instead of asking why Palestinians were resisting oppression, American audiences were pushed to see Israeli repression as self-defence similar to US behaviour. Muslims were often cast as one of two types in American discourse: moderate or extremist, and those criticising Israel were routinely placed in the latter category, which led to stigma and a chilling effect.

Israeli military practices could be cast as useful for America as well. Surveillance, counterinsurgency, targeted killings and other tactics Israel had used in the West Bank and Gaza, which had occasionally been criticised by Washington, were used by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus increasingly legitimised before American audiences.

Some of the greatest purveyors of the Islamophobic narratives that characterised much of the post-9/11 period in the United States included David Horowitz, who consistently sought to connect Palestinians with terrorism and called for profiling to make Palestinian identity itself a security concern; Daniel Pipes, who often characterised Muslim organisations as potentially or secretly militant, casting suspicion on Muslim advocacy; Steven Emerson, who sought to popularise infiltration narratives to try to turn mainstream Muslim organisations into security subjects; Brigitte Gabriel, who regularly framed Islamism as a civilisational threat, thus casting Israel as a front-line defender of the West; and David Yerushalmi, who sought to expand the threat narrative to Sharia law and Muslim political influence, thus casting Muslim political participation as potentially subversive.

The general logic of these narratives was that terrorism was effectively synonymous with all things Palestinian/Arab/Muslim and thus Israel’s security model should be seen as legitimate, if not ideal, by Americans.

It is important 25 years later to reflect on the dangerous political opportunism that spewed hate into American discourse to cast Israel and Israeli policy in a favourable light. A quarter-century later, the US is once again embroiled in a seemingly intractable quagmire, this time in Iran, a losing effort that has already cost Americans more than $100bn through higher petrol and diesel prices. Given all of this, Americans today should be quick to question Islamophobic narratives, the dangerous paths they lead down and the real motives of those who spread them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.