In Kramatorsk, a city that has absorbed Russian fire for much of the war, a strike on a convoy of buses killed 30 people on Thursday. It was one of the deadliest single attacks in weeks, and it landed just as American officials were preparing to reopen a negotiating track that had been largely frozen for months. President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that his negotiating team would travel to Miami to meet Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump's two chief envoys on the conflict, for talks expected to last two days. What distinguishes this round from earlier ones is its size.

Washington has invited national security advisers from Britain, France and Germany, along with representatives of NATO and the European Union, to join the Ukrainian delegation, which Zelensky said would include Kyrylo Budanov, Rustem Umerov, Sergiy Kyslytsya and David Arakhamia. The goal, according to a US official briefed on the plans, is to assemble a single unified proposal rather than separate tracks of American, European and Ukrainian ideas — an approach that has proven difficult to coordinate since Witkoff and Kushner visited Moscow and Kyiv last month. The timing reflects pressures beyond the battlefield. European governments have told Washington they are anxious about energy costs heading into winter, a concern Trump has linked to Ukrainian strikes on Russian diesel refineries rather than to his administration's parallel focus on Iran.

"They are all nervous about the winter," one US source told AFP, adding that a continued war would make the coming months "tough" across the continent. Zelensky has said he hopes for a three-way round of talks with Russia by the end of October, a timeline the Kremlin itself floated last month.