President Donald Trump will host his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Sunday to try to close out a peace agreement that would end nearly four years of war sparked by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s capital and elsewhere in the days before the meeting.
The two will meet at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the U.S. president is spending the holidays. Zelenskyy said the two planned to discuss security and economic agreements and he will raise “territorial issues” as Moscow and Kyiv remain fiercely at odds over the fate of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
In overnight developments, three guided aerial bombs launched by Russia struck 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 post on the Telegram messenger app.
The strike came the day after Russia attacked Ukraine’s capital with ballistic missiles and drones on Saturday, killing at least one person and wounding 27, a day before planned talks between the leaders of Ukraine and the United States, Ukrainian authorities said. Explosions boomed across Kyiv as the attack began in the early morning and continued for hours.
Elsewhere, power line repairs aimed to lessen the risk of a nuclear accident have started near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, after the International Atomic Energy Agency brokered a local ceasefire, the agency said, citing its director general, Rafael Grossi.
In a post on X, the agency said “crucial” works are expected to last a few days. Russian forces have occupied the Zaporizhzhia plant since the early days of the full-scale war. Zelenskyy has said the fate of the plant is one of the key issues to be resolved during the U.S.-led peace negotiations with Russia.
“Ukraine is willing to do whatever it takes to stop this war,” Zelenskyy posted Saturday on X. “We need to be strong at the negotiating table.”
In response to the attacks, he wrote: “We want peace, and Russia demonstrates a desire to continue the war. If the whole world — Europe and America — is on our side, together we will stop” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Saturday, Zelenskyy said the key to peace is “pressure on Russia and sufficient, strong support for Ukraine.” To that end, Carney announced $2.5 billion Canadian (US$1.8 billion) more in economic assistance from his government to help Ukraine rebuild.
Denouncing the “barbarism” of Russia’s latest attacks on Kyiv, Carney credited both Zelenskyy and Trump with creating the conditions for a “just and lasting peace” at a crucial moment.
Trump and Zelenskyy sitting down face-to-face also underscored the apparent progress made by Trump’s top negotiators in recent weeks as the sides traded draft peace plans and continued to shape a proposal to end the fighting. Zelenskyy told reporters Friday that the 20-point draft proposal negotiators have discussed is “about 90% ready” — echoing a figure, and the optimism, that U.S. officials conveyed when Trump’s chief negotiators met with Zelenskyy in Berlin earlier this month.
During the recent talks, the U.S. agreed to offer certain security guarantees to Ukraine similar to those offered to other members of NATO. The proposal came as Zelenskyy said he was prepared to drop his country’s bid to join the security alliance if Ukraine received NATO-like protection that would be designed to safeguard it against future Russian attacks.
‘Intensive’ weeks ahead
Zelenskyy also spoke on Christmas Day with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The Ukrainian leader said in a post on X that they discussed “certain substantive details of the ongoing work” and cautioned in a subsequent post that “there is still work to be done on sensitive issues” and “the weeks ahead may also be intensive.”
The U.S. president has been working to end the war in Ukraine for much of his first year back in office, showing irritation with both Zelenskyy and Putin while publicly acknowledging the difficulty of ending the conflict. Long gone are the days when, as a candidate in 2024, he boasted that he could resolve the fighting in a day.
After hosting Zelenskyy at the White House in October, Trump demanded that both Russia and Ukraine halt fighting and “stop at the battle line,” implying that Moscow should be able to keep the territory it has seized from Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said last week that he would be willing to withdraw troopsfrom Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland as part of a plan to end the war, if Russia also pulls back and the area becomes a demilitarized zone monitored by international forces.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Friday that the Kremlin had already been in contact with U.S.
“It was agreed upon to continue the dialogue,” he said.
Putin wants Russian gains kept, and more
Putin has publicly said he wants all the areas in 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 has insisted that Ukraine withdraw from some areas in eastern Ukraine that Moscow’s forces haven’t captured. Kyiv has publicly rejected all those demands.
The Kremlin also wants Ukraine to abandon its bid to join NATO. It warned that it wouldn’t accept the deployment of any troops from members of the military alliance and would view them as a “legitimate target.”
Putin also has said Ukraine must limit the size of its army and give official status to the Russian language, demands he has made from the outset of the conflict.
Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told the business daily Kommersant this month that Russian police and national guard would stay in parts of Donetsk -– one of the two major areas, along with Luhansk, that make up the Donbas region — even if they become a demilitarized zone under a prospective peace plan.
Ushakov cautioned that trying to reach a compromise could take a long time. He said U.S. proposals that took into account Russian demands had been “worsened” by alterations proposed by Ukraine and its European allies.
Trump has been somewhat receptive to Putin’s demands, making the case that the Russian president can be persuaded to end the war if Kyiv agrees to cede Ukrainian land in the Donbas region and if Western powers offer economic incentives to bring Russia back into the global economy.
