US President Donald Trump welcomed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to his Florida mansion and said diplomacy over the Russia-Ukraine war was in its “final stages”.
The two leaders stood outside the Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday and addressed reporters as they prepared to discuss new proposals to end the bloody conflict.
Recommended stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
The U.S. president has spent much of his first year working hard to bring an end to the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, but he has expressed frustration with both Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, even as he publicly acknowledged the difficulty of ending the fighting.
“We’re … in the final stages of talks and we’re going to wait and see. If we don’t, it’s going to drag on and millions more people will be killed,” Trump said, adding that he had not set a deadline for the process.
“We believe we are ready for an agreement that is beneficial for Ukraine and for everyone.”
He added that a “strong agreement” has been formed to guarantee Ukraine’s security, and that European countries will also be involved.
“We have two parties that are willing. We have two countries that are willing…The people of Ukraine want an end to (the war), the people of Russia want an end to the war, the leaders of both countries want an end to the war,” Trump said.
Russia stepped up attacks on the Ukrainian capital in the days before the Florida meeting.
Zelenskiy, at Trump’s side, said he would discuss with the president the issue of territorial concessions, which had been a red line for the country. He said negotiators and Trump’s advisers had been “talking about ways to move forward step by step and move closer to peace,” and that discussions would continue at Sunday’s meeting.
In recent talks, the United States agreed to provide Ukraine with certain security benefits similar to those provided to other NATO members.
The proposal came as President Zelensky said he was willing to withdraw his participation in the security alliance if it would receive NATO-like protections designed to protect Ukraine from future Russian attacks.
Oleksandr Klyev, an analyst at the Ukraine Prism think tank, said Ukrainians were “quite cynical” about the U.S.-brokered talks.
“We tried this in 2015, 2016 and 2017, but unfortunately each time the Russian side did not even talk about the peace process and even broke the ceasefire,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Therefore, we have little faith that a proper peace process will take place. For now, we are striving for a ceasefire as a precondition for any kind of negotiations…We cannot trust a peace deal on the Russian side, but a ceasefire is something we are working on.”
“I’m blind again.”
Trump’s upbeat tone comes despite widespread skepticism in Europe about Putin’s intentions after Russia again heavily bombarded the Ukrainian capital just as Zelensky was heading to Florida.
Before Zelenskiy’s arrival, Trump spoke with Putin on the phone for more than an hour and said they planned to meet again after Zelenskiy’s meeting, catching Ukraine’s leadership by surprise, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Ratansi reported.
“What we are hearing is that the Zelenskiy delegation here has once again been blindsided by Donald Trump, and according to the Russian side, it was the American insistence that Zelenskiy should have called President Vladimir Putin an hour before he arrived,” he said from Palm Beach, Florida.
Meanwhile, there has been talk of land concessions from the Ukrainian side, but this is outside the framework desired by President Zelensky.
The Kremlin offered a better interpretation of the Trump-Putin meeting, saying they agreed that a mere ceasefire would “only prolong the conflict” as the U.S. leader demands territorial compromises from Ukraine.
President Zelenskiy said last week that he was ready to withdraw troops from eastern Ukraine’s industrial hub as part of his plan to end the war, once Russia also withdraws and the area becomes a demilitarized zone monitored by international forces.
President Putin has publicly stated that he wants all four major regions occupied by his military, as well as the Crimea peninsula, which it illegally annexed in 2014, to be recognized as Russian territory. He also called for Ukraine to withdraw from parts of eastern Ukraine not occupied by Russian forces.
Kiev publicly rejected all these demands.
President Trump has accepted some of Putin’s terms, arguing that he can persuade the Russian president to end the war if Kiev agrees to cede Ukrainian land in the Donbas region and Western countries offer economic incentives to reintegrate Russia into the world economy.
