Zelenskyy to meet Trump in coming days as US steps up push for Ukraine peace deal | Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to travel to the United States for an important meeting with Donald Trump in the coming days, as Washington continues to press for a possible peace agreement between Kiev and Moscow.
Ukraine’s president announced his visit in a social media post on Friday, saying he had received a briefing from Rustam Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council, about new contacts with US officials.
“We are not losing a single day. We agreed to hold a meeting with President Trump at the highest level in the near future,” Zelenskyy said, adding that “many things can be decided before the New Year.”
Washington did not publicly confirm the meeting. Axios reporter Barak Ravid said on X that Trump and Zelenskyy are expected to meet at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida on Sunday.
The potential meeting follows a burst of diplomatic activity last weekend in Miami, where Trump’s peace envoy Steve Witkoff met separately with Russian and Ukrainian representatives, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Although Moscow has downplayed prospects for progress, US officials have described the discussions as “constructive” and there is little sign that Vladimir Putin is ready to soften his maximalist demands to end the large-scale occupation.
At a closed-door meeting with Russia’s business elite on Wednesday evening, the Russian President reportedly reiterated his demand that Ukraine hand over the entire eastern Donbas region as part of any peace agreement.
According to Kommersant, one of Russia’s most connected newspapers, Putin has also signaled that he is open to a limited territorial exchange with Ukraine; Moscow had the potential to swap small swaths of land occupied by Russian forces in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv and southern Zaporizhzhia regions.
Zelenskyy has previously said Ukraine would be open to withdrawing “heavy forces” from parts of Donbas it still controls, but only if Russia mirrored the move as part of a US-backed initiative to create a “free economic zone” in the region.
On Friday, the Kremlin said Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, had held a meeting with the US administration after Moscow received an updated US proposal on a possible peace deal, but there was no sign of progress.
Russia has repeatedly emphasized its readiness to continue fighting in Ukraine if a peace agreement is not reached and has said it is confident it can achieve its war aims through military means.
But while Moscow has made slow and overwhelming progress on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have pushed Russian troops out of the city of Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region in recent days.
This marked a rare Ukrainian counter-offensive that refuted Putin’s repeated claims that the city was under Moscow’s control.
