Key negotiators in the talks to end the war in Ukraine

U.S. President Donald Trump's push for a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine is intensifying.

Officials from the U.S., Ukraine and Russia have crisscrossed the globe in recent weeks in a flurry of meetings aimed at negotiating a deal. Here's a look at the key negotiators in those talks.

Witkoff is a real estate magnate turned White House foreign policy fixer for the Trump administration. He has been at the forefront of complex negotiations to end the world’s two biggest wars in Gaza and Ukraine from a perch that did not require Senate confirmation. The 68-year-old is a longtime friend and golf partner of Trump. He has visited Moscow multiple times in recent months.

Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, has been leading talks with the Ukrainian side and recently headed the U.S. delegation in Geneva, where amendments were introduced to the U.S.-Russia brokered peace plan that heavily favored Russia.

Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law and former White House adviser during the president’s first term. He is a businessman and investor who worked on a wide range of policies in the Trump administration, including brokering a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas earlier this year. He has also been involved in the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, meeting in Florida with the Ukrainian side over the weekend and in Moscow with the Russians.

Driscoll, the U.S. army secretary, is an Iraq War veteran and friend of U.S. Vice President JD Vance. He recently emerged as an unlikely interlocutor in the push to end the war in Ukraine. Driscoll, 38, presented Trump’s plan to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv and later sat down with Russian officials in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the proposals.

Umerov was appointed to lead Ukraine’s delegation in peace talks with U.S. officials in Florida following last week's resignation of Zelenskyy's chief of staff, Andrii Yermak. He served as defense minister from October 2023 until July 2025, when he was appointed to lead Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council after a government shake-up. Since the full-scale war broke out, Umerov has been heavily involved in all key rounds of negotiations.

Ushakov, a longtime Russian diplomat, has served as a presidential aide since 2012. In 1998-2008, he served as Russia’s ambassador to the United States. He speaks English and Danish, according to the Kremlin. Ushakov has been prominently involved in Russia’s talks with the U.S. this year on ending the war in Ukraine, a role highlighted by a report last month that Witkoff coached Ushakov on how Putin should pitch the peace plan to Trump.

Dmitriev, a former investment banker who is now head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, has emerged as a key player in the U.S.-led effort to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. Dmitriev, 50, lacks diplomatic credentials but has increasingly served as a back-channel communicator between the Kremlin and Trump allies, despite being on the U.S. sanctions list.

Lavrov has served as Russia’s foreign minister since 2004. He is known for firmly defending Russian policy in appearances worldwide and regarded as a formidable interlocutor, fluent in English, well-briefed on all affairs and unwaveringly determined to press Russian demands. Lavrov has been involved in Russia’s talks with the U.S. this year on ending the war in Ukraine. He attended the first meeting with a U.S. delegation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in February and has held phone conversations with Rubio.

FILE - Special envoy Steve Witkoff, left, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, center, and Jared Kushner attend a meeting with Ukrainian officials, Nov. 30, 2025, in Hallandale Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Terry Renna, File)

FILE - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gestures during a news conference in Moscow, Russia, Nov. 25, 2025. (Alexander Nemenov/Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, and Secretary of the National Security of Ukraine Rustem Umerov shake hands, Nov. 30, 2025, in Hallandale Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Terry Renna, File)

FILE - In this photo provided by the Ukrainian president's office, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, shakes hands with U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 20, 2025. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, third from right, Russian Presidential Foreign Policy Adviser Yuri Ushakov, fourth from right, and Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev, right, attend talks with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, second from left, and Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, third, at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 2, 2025. (Kristina Kormilitsyna/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

BEIRUT (AP) — When the Israel- Hezbollah war broke out in early March, Hussein Shuman fled the heavy bombardment of the southern suburbs of Beirut, but he didn’t bother trying to rent an apartment elsewhere.

In areas deemed “safe” because the Lebanese militant group has no presence, he feels that Shiite Muslims like him are not welcome. Residents regard them with suspicion as potential Hezbollah members, and landlords charge exorbitant prices to rent to displaced families.

Instead, the 35-year-old, who works at a perfume company, headed to central Beirut where he set up a small tent where he has been staying, along with his wife, 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter.

Shuman even rejected an offer from a friend who invited him to bring his family to the Christian mountain town of Zgharta. He preferred to remain in his tent, even though it has flooded twice in the past two weeks.

“By staying here I have my dignity and respect,” Shuman said, sitting on a chair near his tent as a barber gave him an open-air hair cut. “We will not stay in a place where we are going to be humiliated.”

In a country full of suspicion, the more than 1 million people — most of them Shiite — displaced as a result of Israel’s evacuation orders and airstrikes have limited options.

Some landlords in Christian areas refuse to rent to Shiites. Others demand inflated rents and deposits that few can afford. Fatima Zahra, 42, from Beirut’s southern suburbs, said she and her sister sold their finest jewelry to pay the $5,000 the landlord charged up front for two months’ rent.

In some Beirut neighborhoods, displaced people who can afford to pay high rents are only allowed to take the apartment after landlords inform the security agencies to check on whether the family has any links to Hezbollah.

Sectarian tensions are a sensitive issue in Lebanon because the country fought a 15-year civil war ending in 1990 that largely broke down along sectarian lines.

Social frictions have worsened since Israel’s targeted airstrikes killed Hezbollah officials or members of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in predominantly Christian, Sunni and Druze areas, raising fears among the hosts that Hezbollah members are mingling within the civilian population.

The Lebanese are deeply divided over Hezbollah’s wars with Israel, with many in the small nation blaming the Iran-backed group for dragging the country into a deadly conflict that has so far left more than 1,300 people dead and over 4,000 wounded. Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel two days after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, triggering the ongoing Middle East war.

The renewed war has caused widespread destruction and paralyzed the economy at a time when Lebanon is still in the throes of a historic economic crisis that broke out in late 2019. The country has not yet recovered from the last Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024.

In mid-March, an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in the town of Aramoun killed three people, prompting some local residents to call for the displaced to leave the area.

Days later, an airstrike on the nearby town of Bchamoun also killed three people, including a four-year-old girl, who were displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

In neither case did Israel announce the intended target of the strikes, but neighbors assumed that someone in the targeted apartments was a Hezbollah member.

“Had we known that they were linked to Hezbollah, we would have kicked them out,” an angry man who owns an apartment in the building in Bchamoun said at the scene.

In late March, a missile exploded over the predominantly Christian Keserwan region north of Beirut, with debris falling on different areas. Although the Lebanese army later said that it was an Iranian missile passing over Lebanon that fell, many initially assumed that it was an Israeli airstrike targeting displaced people.

No one was was hurt by the missile debris, but a group of young men attacked displaced Shiites in the district of Haret Sakher near the coastal city of Jounieh, calling for their eviction, before local officials intervened.

“We don’t want them here,” shouted a Haret Sakher resident shortly after the strike. He said that some of the displaced refer to their hosts as “Zionists,” accusing them of being aligned with Israel because they criticize Hezbollah for dragging the country into the conflict. He added: “We don’t want national coexistence.”

George Saadeh, a member of Jounieh’s municipal council, told The Associated Press that he had called on Haret Sakher residents to avoid any reaction “so that we can preserve civil peace.”

In a predominantly Christian area just north of Beirut, plans to house displaced people in an abandoned warehouse near the port were suspended last week after drawing backlash from lawmakers and residents.

“The Israeli targeting campaign has created a lot of paranoia,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center. “If you see a displaced person, maybe you wonder, ‘What if this person is a target?’”

Fearing the tension could slip out of control, the army has beefed up its presence on the streets.

Last week, army commander Gen. Rudolphe Haikal toured Beirut and the southern city of Sidon and told troops that they should be “firm in the face of any attempt to undermine internal stability,” the army said in a statement.

Police forces, including a SWAT unit, were deployed at major intersections in the capital to preserve peace and prevent any friction between the displaced and locals. Police patrols pass through the tent city by Beirut’s coast where Shuman and his family are staying.

An official at the municipality of the predominantly Sunni town of Naameh, just south of Beirut, said that they have received thousands of people displaced from southern Lebanon.

The official said that in order to avoid tensions, they opened a school in one district for displaced Shiites and another in a different neighborhood for people displaced from Sunni border villages.

“There are concerns among people,” that conflict could break out said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

With the Israeli airstrikes and ground invasion mainly targeting Shiite areas, U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, a Lebanese-American, was criticized for stoking sectarianism. He told reporters in late March that the U.S. had asked Israel for a commitment that Christian villages in southern Lebanon will not be attacked.

“We have asked the Israelis to leave Christian villages in the south alone and they told us that they will not touch Christian villages,” Issa said. However, he added, “They (Israelis) said that they cannot guarantee” that the villages would be left alone “if there is infiltration into these villages” by Hezbollah members.

Several Christian villages in southern Lebanon have asked displaced Shiites who were sheltering there to leave, fearing that their presence might trigger Israeli attacks.

Legislator Taymour Joumblatt who is the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, the largest Druze-led political group in the country, said that the biggest concern in the country now is “strife.”

“The most important thing is to reduce sectarian pressures on the ground,” Joumblatt said. “Our Shiites brothers are part of this country and our humanitarian duty is to help them.”

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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre contributed to this report from Beirut.

A woman passes an army soldier at the site where an intercepted missile fell in Sahel Alma, north of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

FILE — A displaced woman who fled Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, carries her belonging as she moves to a better spot to shelter from the rain, past an Arabic anti-war poster that reads, "Sacrificing for whom? Lebanon does not need war," in Beirut, Saturday, March 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)

Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

FILE — A child walks past tents sheltering people displaced by Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, along the Beirut waterfront in Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)

Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

File — Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)