Palm Beach (United States) (AFP) – President Volodymyr Zelensky will push a new peace plan for Ukraine when he sits down with Donald Trump in Florida on Sunday, bolstered by the backing of European leaders but with his capital Kyiv still reeling from a massive Russian bombardment. The US president has been non-committal on the revised 20-point proposal for ending the nearly four-year conflict, while Russian leader Vladimir Putin has offered no indication that Moscow would find it acceptable.
Trump has made ending the Ukraine war a centerpiece of his second term as a self-proclaimed “president of peace,” and he has repeatedly blamed both Kyiv and Moscow for the failure to secure a ceasefire. Sunday’s meeting, to be hosted by Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence at 1:00 pm (1800 GMT), will be their first in-person encounter since October, when the US president refused to grant Zelensky’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles. The Ukrainian leader could face another hard sell this time around, with Trump insisting that he “doesn’t have anything until I approve it.”
The talks are expected to last an hour, after which the two presidents are scheduled to hold a joint call with the leaders of key European allies. The revised peace plan, which emerged from weeks of intense US-Ukraine negotiations, would stop the war along its current front lines and could require Ukraine to pull troops back from the east, allowing the creation of demilitarized buffer zones. As such, it contains Kyiv’s most explicit acknowledgement yet of possible territorial concessions. It does not, however, envisage Ukraine withdrawing from the 20 percent of the eastern Donetsk region that it still controls — Russia’s main territorial demand.
Before landing in Florida, Zelensky made a stopover in Canada during which he held a conference call with European allies, who pledged their full support for his peace efforts and vowed to maintain pressure on Moscow. The Ukrainian leader said he hoped the talks in Florida would be “very constructive,” and stressed that Putin had shown his hand with a deadly drone and missile assault on Kyiv that temporarily knocked out power and heating to hundreds of thousands of residents during freezing temperatures. “This attack is again Russia’s answer on our peace efforts. And this really showed that Putin doesn’t want peace,” he said.
He also told reporters that he would press Trump on the importance of providing security guarantees that would prevent any renewed Russian aggression if a ceasefire were secured. “We need strong security guarantees. We will discuss this and we will discuss the terms,” he said. Ukraine insists it needs more European and US funding and weapons — especially drones.
Russia has accused Ukraine and its European backers of trying to “torpedo” a previous US-brokered plan to stop the fighting, and recent battlefield gains — Russia announced on Saturday it had captured two more towns in eastern Ukraine — are seen as strengthening Moscow’s hand when it comes to peace talks. “If the authorities in Kyiv don’t want to settle this business peacefully, we’ll resolve all the problems before us by military means,” Putin said on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state news agency TASS that Moscow would continue its engagement with US negotiators but criticized European governments as the “main obstacle” to peace. “They are making no secret of their plans to prepare for war with Russia,” Lavrov said, adding that the ambitions of European politicians are “literally blinding them.”
© 2024 AFP
