US President Trump envoys are touting “real progress” after holding talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, including negotiations on the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran conflict, reports NY Post

Sideline diplomacy at the UN General Assembly has historically been where exploratory contacts are conducted and signalled, and claims of 'real progress' from envoys at this stage are a recurring feature of negotiations that are still far from terms. The distinction that has mattered in past episodes is between atmospherics and sequencing: actual de-escalation trades have been built on ceasefire frameworks, sanctions relief schedules, and verification mechanics, none of which are present here. For the Russia-Ukraine track the transmission channel that has mattered is European gas and power, Ukrainian grain corridors, and the sanctions complex around Russian crude flows; for the Iran track it is the crude risk premium, with any credible normalisation path historically feeding through expectations for sanctioned barrels returning to market rather than immediate supply. Envoys of this profile, operating outside conventional diplomatic channels, have a mixed track record, and markets have tended to fade headline optimism until it is corroborated by counterparties rather than one side's readout. Worth noting is that the sourcing is a single tabloid account of one envoy's characterisation, which sits at the low end of the confirmation hierarchy. The follow-ons that have carried signal in comparable episodes are responses from Moscow, Tehran, and Kyiv, any scheduled next round with an agenda, and movement in the fronts of the crude curve and European gas rather than spot headlines.