Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he plans to meet US President Donald Trump on Sunday to discuss territory and security guarantees as efforts continue to end the war with Russia.
“This meeting is specifically for the purpose of finalising everything as much as we can,” Mr Zelensky said.
An advisor to the Ukrainian leader said the meeting would take place in Florida.
Earlier, President Zelensky said that a lot could be decided before the new year as Washington pushes diplomatic efforts to halt the fighting.
He added that documents, part of a wider framework aimed at ending the conflict and ensuring Ukraine’s reconstruction, were “nearly ready” while others were “fully prepared”.
The comments came after the latest round of negotiations between US and Ukrainian teams produced a 20-point plan to end the war, which has been sent to Moscow for feedback.
The proposals would freeze the frontline and remove a requirement for Kyiv to legally renounce its bid to join NATO, President Zelensky said on Wednesday.
But he also indicated the plan opened the way to eventually pulling Ukrainian troops back in the eastern Donetsk region and establishing a demilitarised zone – positions that he has been reluctant to accept.
Mr Zelensky held talks yesterday with President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Russia said that foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov held a telephone call with unnamed US officials to discuss the negotiations.
It did not elaborate nor indicate its position on the latest plan.
Moscow has shown little inclination to abandon its hardline territorial demands that Ukraine fully withdraw from the eastern Donbas region and relinquish its NATO ambitions, as well as a ban on Western countries deploying peacekeeping troops to the country.
Russia reported to be open to territory swap
President Vladimir Putin has told some of Russia’s top businessmen that he might be open to swapping territory controlled by Russian forces in Ukraine but that he wanted the whole of Donbas, Kommersant newspaper reported.
Its Kremlin correspondent, Andrei Kolesnikov, said that that Mr Putin briefed top businessmen on the details of the plan at a late-night Kremlin meeting on Christmas Eve.
“Vladimir Putin asserted that the Russian side is still ready to make the concessions that he made in Anchorage. In other words, that ‘Donbas is ours,'” Kommersant – one of Russia’s top newspapers – reported.
In essence, he wants the whole of Donbas but outside that area “a partial exchange of territories from the Russian side is not ruled out,” Mr Kolesnikov wrote.
Russia controls all of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, about 90% of Donbas, 75% of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to Russian estimates.
According to Kommersant, President Putin also raised the issue of the Zaporizhzhia power plant at his meeting with businessmen.
He is quoted as saying that joint Russian-US management of the site was being discussed.
Mr Putin also said that the United States had expressed an interest in crypto mining near the plant and that the facility should be used to partially supply Ukraine, Kommersant said.