EPA/ShutterstockUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will meet his US counterpart Donald Trump in Florida on Sunday, as talks continue on ending Russia’s full-scale war.
Zelensky said he expected the meeting to focus on a US-brokered peace plan, and separate proposals for US security guarantees. But a senior Russian official said the plan was “radically different” to the one it was negotiating with the US.
Moscow has spoken of “slow but steady progress” in talks but has not commented on Zelensky’s offer to withdraw troops from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, if Russia pulls back too.
On Saturday night, blasts were heard in Kyiv, in what Ukrainian officials said was a new Russian aerial attack.
Kyiv Major Vitaliy Klitschko said Ukraine’s air defence forces were repelling the attack, urging residents of the Ukrainian capital to go shelters. It was not immediately clear whether there were any casualties.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Moscow currently controls about 75% of the Donetsk region, and some 99% of the neighbouring Luhansk. The regions are collectively known as Donbas.
Ukraine has sought to secure guarantees from the US as part of a peace deal, and Zelensky has suggested that a demilitarised “free economic zone” is a potential option for areas of Donbas that Russia has failed to take by force.
On Friday, Zelensky told reporters that the 20-point plan was 90% complete: “Our task is to make sure everything is 100% ready.”
He wrote on social media: “We are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level – with President Trump in the near future. A lot can be decided before the new year.”
But in an interview with Politico published on Friday, Trump said his Ukrainian counterpart “doesn’t have anything until I approve it”.
“I think it’s going to go good with him. I think it’s going to go good with [Vladimir] Putin,” Trump said.
He also said he expects to speak with the Russian president “soon”.
Trump also told Politico that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would visit him in the coming days.
Putin’s senior aides have held further talks with US officials over the phone, after Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev returned from a meeting in Florida last weekend.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov was positive about latest developments, but accused Ukraine of trying to “torpedo” talks on the US plan.
“I think December 25, 2025, will remain in all our memories as a milestone when we truly came close to a solution. But whether we can make the final push and reach an agreement depends on our work and the political will of the other side,” he said in comments to Russian state TV on Friday.
Shortly after details of Zelensky’s imminent visit to Florida emerged, the mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city in the north-east, said two people had been killed and several others wounded in a Russian air strike.
ReutersZelensky has met Trump several times this year, since an initial White House meeting in February descended into a hostile shouting match. Their most recent meeting at the White House in October was far more amicable.
Confirmation of planned top-level talks came after the Ukrainian leader said he had spoken to Trump’s chief negotiators, special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, for an hour over the phone on Christmas Day.
He said the latest round of negotiations had generated “new ideas” on how to end the war, and described it as a “really good conversation”.
The White House has proposed establishing what would in effect be a demilitarised zone in eastern Ukraine where both sides agree not to deploy troops – a compromise that would avoid settling the intractable question of legal ownership over the contested territory.
Zelensky signalled on Wednesday that if Ukraine were to pull back by up to 40km (25 miles) from the front line in the east to create an economic zone, then Russia would have to do the same from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the Donbas.
Ukraine has secured a number of changes to an earlier 28-point draft plan, which was formulated by Witkoff but widely seen as being favourable to Russia.
Zelensky told reporters on Friday that the weekend talks in Florida would focus on several documents, including US security guarantees and a separate economic agreement.
However, Zelensky has repeatedly said the question of territory has proved to be the most difficult issue to resolve, along with the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
The White House has proposed Ukraine and Russia split the energy generated by the plant, the largest in Europe. Russian troops currently control it.
Russia is unlikely to agree to a number of points in the updated US plan, especially its territorial proposals. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused “groups of states, primarily Western European” of seeking to derail the diplomatic progress that had been made.
Putin has repeatedly warned that Ukrainian troops must withdraw from all of Donbas or Russia will seize it, rejecting any compromise over how to end the war.
Zelensky outlined the latest version of the plan this week, the first time since the original 28-point draft was leaked in November.
Latest proposals commit the US and Europe to providing security guarantees modelled on Nato’s Article 5, committing allies to providing military support in the event Russia launches a renewed invasion.
The deal would also see Ukraine’s military maintained at 800,000 personnel, a level the Kremlin has demanded be cut.
