Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to travel to the US for a planned meeting with Donald Trump on Sunday, as Washington continues to push for a possible peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow.
The Ukrainian president said the visit would take place at a location in Florida – widely expected to be Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – in what would be the latest development in a diplomatic push that began in November with the circulation of a 28-point US plan shaped with input from Russian officials.
“We are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level – with President Trump in the near future,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X on Friday, adding that “a lot can be decided before the New Year”.
Zelenskyy later told journalists the high-stakes meeting with Trump was planned for Sunday and would focus on some of the most sensitive parts of the peace talks, including Ukrainian security guarantees and reconstruction.
“This meeting is specifically intended to refine things as much as we possibly can,” Zelenskyy said.
He added that the proposed 20-point peace plan was “90% ready”.
“Our goal is to bring everything to 100%,” Zelenskyy said. He later added: “As of today, our teams – the Ukrainian and American negotiating teams – have made significant progress.”
The plan is considered an updated version of an earlier 28-point document agreed several weeks ago between the US envoys and Russian officials, a proposal widely viewed as skewed towards the Kremlin’s demands. Ukraine has pushed for security guarantees modelled on Nato’s article 5 mutual defence pledge under any proposed peace deal with Russia, though it remains unclear whether Moscow would accept such terms.
“Russia constantly looks for reasons not to agree,” to the peace proposals, Zelenskyy told reporters.
Washington has not publicly confirmed the meeting.
The announcement follows a burst of diplomatic activity last weekend in Miami, where Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met separately with Russian and Ukrainian representatives, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
US officials described the discussions as “constructive”, though Moscow has played down expectations of progress and there are few signs that Vladimir Putin is prepared to soften his maximalist demands to end the full-scale invasion.
At a closed-door meeting with Russia’s business elite on Wednesday evening, the Russian president reportedly reiterated his demand that Ukraine hand over the entire eastern Donbas region as part of any peace deal.
According to Kommersant, one of Russia’s best-connected newspapers, Putin also indicated openness to a limited territorial exchange with Ukraine, with Moscow potentially exchanging small areas of land Russian forces occupy in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv and southern Zaporizhzhia regions.
Zelenskyy has previously said Ukraine would be open to withdrawing “heavy forces” from parts of Donbas it still controls, but only if Russia mirrored the move as part of a US-backed initiative to create a “free economic zone” in the region.
It remains highly uncertain that Moscow would accept either a suggested demilitarised buffer zone or a withdrawal of its forces, even as other sticking points remain, including control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that Kyiv says should be jointly managed by the US and Ukraine.
On Friday, the Kremlin said Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, had held a call with the US administration after Moscow received an updated US proposal on a potential peace deal, although there were no signs that a breakthrough had been reached.
Russia has repeatedly said it was prepared to continue fighting in Ukraine if no peace deal were reached, saying it was confident it could achieve its war aims through military means.
Yet while Moscow has made slow, grinding progress on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have in recent days pushed Russian troops out of the city of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region.
It marked a rare successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, prompting frustration among pro-war Russian bloggers over what many described as overly upbeat and unrealistic battlefield briefings.
“On the Kupyansk front, large-scale territorial losses have come to light, caused by the systematic submission of false reports that exaggerated the Russian armed forces’ successes in the battle for Kupyansk and surrounding settlements,” the popular Telegram channel Rybar, which has close links to the defence ministry, wrote.
In late November, senior Russian generals briefed Putin that Russian troops had “completed the liberation of Kupyansk”, prompting Zelenskyy to travel to the city’s outskirts to “show the world that Putin is lying”.
