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President Donald Trump will welcome his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr ZelenskySunday, in an attempt to reach a peace deal that would end nearly four years of war sparked by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia intensified its attacks against Ukraine capital and elsewhere in the days leading up to the meeting.
The two men will meet at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the US president is vacationing. Zelenskyy, who arrived in Miami in the morning, said the two planned to discuss security and economic agreements during their meeting early this afternoon. He said he would raise “territorial questions” as Moscow and kyiv remain fiercely at odds over the fate of eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region.
Overnight, three guided aerial bombs launched by Russia hit private homes in the eastern city of Sloviansk, according to the head of the local military administration, Vadym Lakh. Three people were injured and one man died, Lakh said in a message posted on messaging app Telegram.
The strike comes a day after Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital on Saturday with ballistic missiles and drones, killing at least one person and injuring 27 others, a day before planned negotiations between Ukrainian and American leaders, Ukrainian authorities said. Explosions erupted across kyiv when the attack began early in the morning and continued for hours.
Before his meeting with Trump, Zelensky said Sunday he spoke on the phone with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, briefing him “on the situation on the front line and the consequences of the Russian strikes.” He posted on X: “Thank you, Keir, for the constant coordination! » Zelensky’s office said he would speak by telephone with his allies after the meeting with Trump.
In a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Saturday, Zelenskyy said the key to peace was “pressure on Russia and sufficient and strong support for Ukraine.” To that end, Carney announced increased economic aid from his government to help Ukraine rebuild.
Denouncing the “barbarity” of the latest Russian attacks on kyiv, Carney credited Zelensky and Trump with creating the conditions for a “just and lasting peace” at a crucial moment.
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“Ukraine is ready to do whatever it takes to end this war,” Zelensky said Saturday. “We must be strong at the negotiating table. »
In response to the attacks, he wrote: “We want peace and Russia is demonstrating its desire to continue the war. If the whole world – Europe and America – is on our side, together we will stop” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump and Zelensky, sitting opposite each other, also highlighted the apparent progress made by Trump’s top negotiators in recent weeks, as the sides exchanged draft peace plans and continued to hammer out a proposal to end the fighting. Zelenskyy told reporters Friday that the 20-point draft proposal discussed by negotiators was “about 90 percent ready” — echoing a figure and optimism expressed by U.S. officials when Trump’s chief negotiators met with Zelenskyy in Berlin earlier this month.
During recent negotiations, the United States agreed to offer Ukraine certain security guarantees similar to those offered to other NATO members. The proposal comes as Zelensky says he is ready to abandon his country’s candidacy for the security alliance if Ukraine benefits from NATO-like protection, intended to protect it against future Russian attacks.
“Intensive” weeks to come
Zelensky also spoke on Christmas Day with US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The Ukrainian leader said they discussed “some substantive details” and warned that “there is still work to be done on sensitive issues” and that “the coming weeks could also be intense.”
The US president has worked to end the war in Ukraine for much of his first year in office, venting anger at both Zelensky and Putin while publicly acknowledging the difficulty of ending the conflict. The days when, as a candidate in 2024, he boasted of being able to resolve fights in a day are long gone.
After welcoming Zelensky to the White House in October, Trump demanded that Russia and Ukraine stop fighting and “stop at the battle line,” implying that Moscow should be able to hold on to the territory it captured from Ukraine.
Zelensky said last week he would be ready to withdraw his troops from Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland as part of a plan to end the war, if Russia also withdrew and the area became a demilitarized zone monitored by international forces.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that the Kremlin had already been in contact with the United States.
“It was agreed to continue the dialogue,” he said.
Putin wants Russian achievements to be preserved, and more
Putin has publicly stated that he wants all areas of four key regions that have been captured by his forces, as well as the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed in 2014, to be recognized as Russian territory. He also insisted that Ukraine withdraw from some areas of eastern Ukraine that Moscow’s forces have not captured. Kyiv has publicly rejected all these demands.
The Kremlin also wants Ukraine to abandon its NATO candidacy. He warned that he would not accept the deployment of troops from the military alliance and that he would consider them a “legitimate target”.
Putin also said Ukraine must limit the size of its army and grant official status to the Russian language, demands he made from the start of the conflict.
Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told the Kommersant business daily this month that Russian police and national guards would remain in parts of Donetsk – one of the two main areas, along with Luhansk, that make up the Donbass region – even if it became a demilitarized zone under a possible peace plan.
Ushakov warned that trying to reach a compromise could take a long time. He said U.S. proposals that took Russian demands into account had been “worsened” by changes proposed by Ukraine and its European allies.
Trump has been somewhat receptive to Putin’s demands, arguing that the Russian president can be persuaded to end the war if kyiv agrees to cede Ukrainian lands in the Donbas region and if Western powers offer economic incentives to bring Russia back into the global economy.
—Kim reported from Washington and Morton from London. Associated Press writers Illia Novikov in Kyiv and Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.
