US envoy Kellogg says Ukraine peace deal is close
US President Donald Trump’s outgoing envoy to Ukraine said an agreement to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and now depends on the solution of two important issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in Donbas, which consists of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The Ukrainian war is the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II and has triggered the largest conflict between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
U.S. Special Envoy Keith Kellogg, who is expected to leave his post in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict are in the “last 10 yards” and that is always the hardest.
Kellogg said the two main issues that stand out are territorial – primarily the future of Donbas – and the future of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe under Russian control.
“If we get those two things done, I think everything else will work out pretty well,” Kellogg said Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re really close.”
Kellogg’s comments come as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy prepares to visit London for talks on peace proposals.
The Ukrainian leader will meet with British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at Downing Street on Monday.
Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq, said the scale of deaths and injuries caused by the Ukraine war was “appalling” and unprecedented for a regional war.
Since the beginning of the war, Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than two million casualties, including dead and wounded, Kellogg said. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has released reliable estimates of their losses.
Russia currently controls 19 percent of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 percent of Donetsk, about 75 percent of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
A draft of 28 leaked US peace proposals emerged last month, alarming Ukrainian and European officials who say it acquiesces to Moscow’s core demands for NATO, Russia’s control of a fifth of Ukraine and restrictions on the Ukrainian military.
These proposals, which Russia says currently contain 27 articles, are divided into four different components, according to the Kremlin. The full content is not in the public domain.
According to the first proposals of the USA, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, whose reactors are currently in cold shutdown, will be reactivated under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the electricity produced will be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine.
The president said Saturday that he had a long and “important” phone call with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The Kremlin said Friday that it expects Kushner to do the real work in drafting a possible deal.
