(AFP) – US President Donald Trump spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of a fresh round of talks Thursday aimed at ending Russia’s invasion, both sides said on Wednesday. A White House official gave AFP no further details about the call, which came a day before Ukrainian and US envoys were to meet, and ahead of new trilateral talks with Russia expected in early March.
But Zelensky wrote on social media that he had spoken with Trump, and that his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were on the call. “Our teams work intensively and I thanked them for all their work and for their active involvement in the negotiations and the efforts to end the war,” he added. According to Ukrainian presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn, the conversation “lasted about 30 minutes.” Ukraine’s lead negotiator Rustem Umerov will meet Witkoff and Kushner in Geneva on Thursday, Kyiv announced.
Russian state news agency Tass later said that the Kremlin’s economic affairs envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, also plans to be in the city. “Dmitriev plans to arrive in Geneva on Thursday to pursue negotiations with the Americans on economic issues,” it cited an unnamed source as saying. The meetings are the latest round of negotiations spearheaded by Trump that so far have failed to make meaningful progress on ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II. Washington is pushing to bring an end to the war triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago, which has left hundreds of thousands dead and destroyed swathes of territory, particularly in eastern and southern Ukraine.
– Preparatory talks –
Zelensky said his call with Trump “discussed the issues that our representatives will address tomorrow in Geneva during the bilateral meeting, as well as preparations for the next meeting of the full negotiating teams in a trilateral format at the very beginning of March.” “We expect this meeting to create an opportunity to move talks to the leaders’ level. President Trump supports this sequence of steps. This is the only way to resolve all the complex and sensitive issues and finally end the war,” he added.
The Ukrainian leader has already said that a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, should take place to resolve the most difficult issues in the talks. The talks, based on an American plan unveiled at the end of last year, are deadlocked primarily on the fate of the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine that has been the epicentre of the fighting. Russia is pushing for full control of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and has threatened to take it by force if Kyiv does not cave at the negotiating table. But Ukraine has rejected the demand and signalled it would not sign a deal without security guarantees that deter Russia from invading again.
© 2024 AFP
