Will Weissert, Seung Min Kim and Elise Morton
West Palm Beach: US President Donald Trump says he has had a “good and very productive” phone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he meets with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to try to close out a peace agreement that would end nearly four years of war sparked by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia, which intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s capital and elsewhere in the days before the meeting, said the call was initiated by the US side and was “friendly, benevolent, and businesslike”. Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Trump and Putin agreed to speak again “promptly” after Trump’s meeting with Zelensky.
Trump said they spoke for two and a half hours and he believed Putin “wants to get it done”.
Trump and Zelensky are meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, where the US president is spending the holidays. Zelensky, who arrived in Miami overnight, said the two would discuss security and economic agreements. He said he would 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, killing at least one person and wounding 27. Explosions boomed across Kyiv as the attack began in the early morning on Saturday and continued for hours.
In advance of his meeting with Trump, Zelensky said he spoke on the phone with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, filling him in “on the situation on the frontline and on the consequences of Russian strikes”. He posted on X: “Thank you, Keir, for the constant co-ordination!” Zelensky’s office said he will speak by phone with allies after the meeting with Trump.
Trump and Zelensky are meeting in the main dining room of Mar-a-Lago and the news media has been allowed in.
In a meeting on Saturday (Sunday AEDT) with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Zelensky said the key to peace was “pressure on Russia and sufficient, strong support for Ukraine”. To that end, Carney announced more economic assistance from his government to help Ukraine rebuild.
Denouncing the “barbarism” of Russia’s latest attacks on Kyiv, Carney credited both Zelensky and Trump with creating the conditions for a “just and lasting peace” at a crucial moment.
“Ukraine is willing to do whatever it takes to stop this war,” Zelensky posted. “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” Putin.
Trump and Zelensky sitting down face-to-face also underscores 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. Zelensky told reporters on Friday that the 20-point draft proposal negotiators had discussed was “about 90 per cent ready” – echoing a figure, and the optimism, that US officials conveyed when Trump’s chief negotiators met with Zelensky in Berlin earlier this month.
During the recent talks, the US agreed to offer certain security guarantees to Ukraine similar to those offered to other members of NATO. The proposal came as Zelensky 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
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 “certain substantive details” and cautioned “there is still work to be done on sensitive issues” and “the weeks ahead may also be intensive”.
The US president has been working to end the war in Ukraine for much of his first year back in office, showing irritation with both Zelensky 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 Zelensky 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.
Zelensky said last week that he would be willing to withdraw troops from Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland as part of a plan to end the war, if Russia also pulls back and the area becomes a demilitarised zone monitored by international forces.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that the Kremlin had already been in contact with US.
“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 recognised 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 demilitarised zone under a prospective peace plan.
Ushakov cautioned that trying to reach a compromise could take a long time. He said US 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.
AP
