US President Donald Trump’s envoy to Ukraine said a deal to end the war in Ukraine is “very close” and depends on resolving just two key issues, but Moscow said there needed to be radical changes to some of the US proposals.
Trump, who wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker” president, says ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II has so far been the most important foreign policy goal of his presidency.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
US special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, who is expected to leave his post in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict were in the “last 10 meters”, which he said had always been the most difficult.
nuclear power plant
The two main outstanding issues, according to Kellogg, are in the territory – mainly the future of Donbas – and also the Ukrainian nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia, the largest in Europe, which is under Russian control.
“If we can resolve those two issues, I think the rest of the things will work out very well,” said Kellogg at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there. We’re very, very close,” he added.
After President Vladimir Putin held four hours of talks in the Kremlin last week with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Putin’s top foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov revealed that “territorial issues” were discussed.
That’s Kremlin shorthand for Russia’s claims to Donbas, although Ukraine still controls at least 5,000 km² of the area. Almost all countries recognize Donbas as part of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the handover of the rest of Donetsk would be illegal without a referendum and would give Russia a platform to launch deeper attacks into Ukraine in the future.
Ushakov was quoted by Russian media on Sunday as saying that the United States would have to “make serious and radical changes to its documents” on Ukraine. He did not clarify what changes Moscow wanted Washington to make.
Zelenskiy said on Saturday that he had had a long and “substantial” telephone conversation with Witkoff and Kushner. The Kremlin said it expects Kushner to be doing the main work in crafting a possible deal.
