Jared Kushner

Kushner holds no Senate-confirmed POST, yet he has become a fixture of Washington's Ukraine diplomacy. He joined the 5 September meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow and the talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv the next day; neither produced an announced result.

In Miami the message to Kyiv hardened. Kushner's Miami round with a Kyiv TEAM that included Budanov and Umerov ended on 9 October after one of two planned days. Axios reported the envoys tied US intelligence sharing to Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries. The next step Kushner's side wants is a technical meeting that brings Russia in before November. For Kushner that is a second test of the deal-first method he used in The Gulf in 2020, now applied to a war that Russia says it will keep fighting during talks.

On the Iran file Kushner spent the spring and early summer behind mediators. He was in the Doha shuttle round of 1 July, when Qatar and Pakistan carried messages between rooms and Washington, Tehran and Doha then gave three different accounts of the same session.

That changed on 22 September, when he and Steve Witkoff met Abbas Araghchi in New York in the war's first structured American contact with Iran. Tehran asked for the blockade lifted, oil sanctions waived, about $12bn in frozen assets released and a Ceasefire covering Lebanon. Trump rejected Iran's Hormuz plan on 26 September. The Gulf states Kushner courted for the Abraham Accords now pull the other way: Saudi Arabia and the UAE want the blockade kept until Iran signs.