US and Ukraine ‘a lot closer’ on peace deal, Trump says after meeting with Zelensky |
PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) — US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were “getting a lot closer, maybe very close” to an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, while acknowledging that the fate of the disputed Donbas region remains a key unresolved issue.
The two leaders spoke at a joint news conference after meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Sunday afternoon. Both leaders reported progress on two of the most contentious issues in peace talks — security guarantees for Ukraine and the division of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region that Russia has sought to capture.
Both Trump and Zelensky offered few details and did not provide a deadline for completing a peace deal, although Trump said it would be clear “in a few weeks” whether negotiations to end the war would succeed. He said a few “thorny issues” around territory must be resolved.
Zelensky said an agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine has been reached. Trump was slightly more cautious, saying that they were 95% of the way to such an agreement, and that he expected European countries to “take over a big part” of that effort with US backing.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in an X post published after Trump met with Zelensky, said progress was made on security guarantees. Macron said countries in the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” would meet in Paris in early January to finaliזe their “concrete contributions.”
Zelensky has said previously that he hopes to soften a US proposal for Ukrainian forces to withdraw completely from Donbas, a Russian demand that would mean ceding some territory held by Ukrainian forces. While Moscow insists on getting all of Donbas, Kyiv wants the map frozen at the current battle........