Putin orders 3-day pause in strikes on Kyiv as US delegation arrives in Russia

BREAKING: Putin orders a three-day pause in strikes on Kyiv as US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrive in Moscow for peace talks.

Putin just ordered a three-day halt to strikes on Kyiv. That's the Kremlin's opening gesture as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner touch down in Moscow, the pause timed exactly to the American visit.

The man ordering it, you can see here, has spent months pounding Ukrainian cities while talks sat frozen. So a seventy-two hour ceasefire on one city is less an olive branch than a stopwatch. It runs precisely as long as Trump's envoys are in the room.

And remember who's in that room. Witkoff and Kushner, the two men Trump sent to close this war, dealmakers by trade, not diplomats. Kyiv gets three quiet nights, and everyone there knows the maths, the pause has an expiry date written into it.

The hardest fact is this. Putin can switch the bombing of a capital city off with one order, which tells you it could never have been anything but a choice.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.