A suspected Ukrainian drone attack rocked the Chechen capital, Grozny, early on December 5 just hours after Ukrainian negotiators met with US officials in Florida seeking details from a meeting at the Kremlin between American and Russian teams on a proposal to end the war on Ukraine.
Social media users posted videos -- verified by RFE/RL -- online showing a gaping hole in a high-rise building in Grozny, in an attack that hit less than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from the residence of the republic's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Regional officials have yet to comment publicly on the attack, but sources told RFE/RL's Caucasus.Realities that at least four more explosions occurred in Russia's North Caucasus after a drone attack struck the high-rise complex, which houses government offices.
The sources said an empty police station in Gudermes and a Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Achkhoy-Martan were damaged in the blasts. No deaths were reported in any of the incidents.
Late on December 4, Ukrainian negotiators met with US special envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss his visit to the Kremlin earlier this week where he spoke for almost five hours with Vladimir Putin, where the Russian leader doubled down on his hard-line conditions to end the war on Ukraine.
Neither US nor Russian officials have publicly given details of the talks.
"Our task now is to obtain full information about what was said in Moscow and what other pretexts Putin has come up with to drag out the war and to pressure Ukraine," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media late on December 4.
"Ukraine is prepared for any possible developments, and of course we will work as constructively as possible with all partners to ensure that peace is achieved – and that it is, after all, a dignified peace," he added.
On December 4, Putin repeated his longstanding and unbending demands on Ukraine’s sovereignty and military force in an interview with India Today.
"It all comes down to this: Either we liberate these territories by force or Ukrainian troops leave these territories and stop fighting there," Putin told the channel in a pre-recorded interview released on the eve of his trip to India.
The Moscow visit by the US delegation, which included Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, came almost two weeks after a US-drafted peace plan seen as heavily favorable to Russia was released. The plan echoed most, if not all of the inflexible demands Moscow has made of Ukraine since before the February 2022 full-scale invasion.
Ukrainian officials and Kyiv's European allies have since scrambled to try and craft an acceptable alternative. Ukrainian officials also met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Witkoff, a real estate developer with no prior diplomatic experience, made no comment to the media before leaving Moscow. It was Witkoff's sixth trip to the Russian capital since January -- one indication of how difficult it has been to end the fighting, despite Trump's insistence he could end it within 24 hours of taking office.
US Vice President JD Vance acknowledged those difficulties in an interview aired late on December 4 by NBC News.
“I think that we really thought -- and you’ve heard the president say this a million times -- that that would be the easiest war to solve. And if you would put peace in the Middle East as easier to achieve than peace in Eastern Europe, I would have told you you were crazy,” Vance said.
“I do think, for what it’s worth, that we have made a lot of progress, but we’re not yet quite across the finish line there,” he added.
