Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and U.S. President Donald Trump will meet in Florida on Sunday to hammer out a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but face major differences on crucial issues and provocations from Russian air attacks.
Russia struck Kyiv and other parts of war-torn Ukraine with hundreds of missiles and drones on Saturday, knocking out power and heat in parts of the capital. Zelenskiy called it Russia’s response to the ongoing U.S. brokered peace efforts.
Zelenskiy revealed to journalists that he plans to discuss the fate of eastern Ukraine’s contested Donbas region during the meeting at Trump’s Florida residence, as well as the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and other topics.
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The Ukrainian president and his delegation arrived in Florida late on Saturday, Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Serhiy Kyslytsya disclosed on X.
“Good evening, Florida!” Kyslytsya wrote, accompanying the post with a photo of an aircraft bearing the U.S. president’s surname on the fuselage.
Moscow has repeatedly insisted that Ukraine yield all of the Donbas, even areas still under Kyiv’s control, and Russian officials have objected to other parts of the latest proposal, sparking doubts about whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would accept whatever Sunday’s talks might produce.
The Ukrainian president told Axios on Friday he still hopes to soften a U.S. proposal for Ukrainian forces to withdraw completely from the Donbas. Failing that, Zelenskiy said the entire 20-point plan, the result of weeks of negotiations, should be put to a referendum vote.
Russia controls all of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and since its invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago has taken control of about 12% of its territory, including about 90% of Donbas, 75% of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to Russian estimates.
Putin said on December 19 that he thought a peace deal should be based on conditions he set out in 2024: Ukraine withdrawing from all of the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and Kyiv officially renouncing its aim to join NATO.
Ukrainian officials and European leaders view the war as an imperial-style land grab by Moscow and have warned that if Russia gets its way with Ukraine, it will one day attack NATO members.
The 20-point plan was spun off from a Russian-led 28-point plan, which emerged from talks between U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, and which became public in November.
Subsequent talks between Ukrainian officials and U.S. negotiators have produced the more Kyiv-friendly 20-point plan.
Reuters