PALM BEACH, Florida: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will sit down Sunday (Dec 28) with Donald Trump and search to safe the US president’s stamp of approval for a new proposal to finish the almost four-year battle with Russia.
The 20-point plan, which emerged from weeks of intense US-Ukraine negotiations, lacks Moscow’s approval, and the face-to-face in Florida comes within the wake of a large Russian missile and drone assault on Kyiv.
The assembly, hosted by Trump at his opulent Mar-a-Lago residence, would be the pair’s first in-person encounter since October, when the US president refused to grant Zelenskyy’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.
Throughout a stopover in Canada on Saturday, Zelenskyy mentioned he hoped the talks could be “very constructive” and mentioned Russian chief Vladimir Putin had proven his hand with the newest assault on the Ukrainian capital.
“This assault is once more, Russia’s reply on our peace efforts. And this actually confirmed that Putin does not need peace,” he mentioned.
EUROPEANS VOW SUPPORT
Whereas in Canada, Zelenskyy held a convention name with European leaders who, in response to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, pledged their full assist for his peace efforts.
Russia has accused Ukraine and its European backers of making an attempt to “torpedo” a earlier US-brokered plan to cease the preventing.
EU chiefs Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa, who participated within the convention name, mentioned the European Union’s backing for Ukraine would by no means falter and vowed to keep up stress on the Kremlin to come back to phrases.
Trump has to this point been non-committal on the brand new peace proposal.
Zelenskyy “does not have something till I approve it,” the president mentioned in an interview with Politico on Friday. “So we’ll see what he is acquired.”
The talks will handle a plan that may cease the conflict alongside its present entrance strains and will require Ukraine to tug again troops from the east, permitting the creation of demilitarised buffer zones.
As such, it accommodates Kyiv’s most express acknowledgement but of attainable territorial concessions.
But it surely doesn’t envisage Ukraine withdrawing from the 20 per cent of the jap Donetsk area that it nonetheless controls – Russia’s principal territorial demand.
Trump has made ending the Ukraine and Gaza wars the centerpiece of his self-proclaimed second time period as a “president of peace”.
However the Ukraine conflict has, by his personal admission, proved far more durable than he anticipated, and the president has repeatedly voiced his frustration with each side for failing to safe a truce.
