American and Russian officials are expected to meet in Moscow on Thursday as President Vladimir V. Putin weighs a 30-day cease-fire proposal from the United States and Ukraine.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters at about midday Moscow time on Thursday that American officials were en route.
“Negotiators are indeed flying in, and contacts are indeed planned,” Mr. Peskov said. “We won’t get ahead of ourselves — we’ll talk about it afterward.”
Shortly after Mr. Peskov’s remarks, Russian news agencies reported that a plane frequently used by Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, had landed in Moscow from Qatar. This would be Mr. Witkoff’s second visit to Russia in weeks. Last month, he met with Mr. Putin for several hours when he came to Moscow to finalize the prisoner exchange that freed Marc Fogel, an American schoolteacher jailed in Russia.
Ukraine has said it will back a temporary cease-fire if Russia does the same.
Mr. Peskov said Thursday that Russia would only offer its response to the cease-fire proposal after talks with the United States in which American officials would lay out that plan in more detail. Mr. Trump has said that he planned to speak to Mr. Putin directly this week.
“After we receive this information — not through the press but through bilateral dialogue — then the time will come for thinking it over and formulating a position,” Mr. Peskov said.
Also on Thursday, Mr. Putin is expected to meet the authoritarian president of neighboring Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The two close allies will hold a news conference in which Mr. Putin could make his first public remarks about the 30-day cease-fire offer, Tass, Russia’s state news agency, reported.
The flurry of diplomacy came as Moscow’s forces intensified a campaign to push Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region of Russia, the border area where Kyiv’s troops occupied several hundred square miles of territory in a surprise incursion last August.
