Zelensky favours US proposal of three-way talks with Ukraine and Russia if it produces results

KYIV – President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Dec 20 that Ukraine would back a US proposal for three-sided talks with the United States and Russia if this facilitated more exchanges of prisoners and paved the way for meetings of national leaders.

Mr Zelensky, speaking to local journalists in Kyiv, also said top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov had told him of the latest discussions that took place on Dec 19 with US negotiators
in the United States.

A new round was scheduled for Dec 20, he said, focusing on Ukraine’s post-war recovery. Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev was also in Miami for talks with US officials.

Mr Zelensky said the United States was now proposing three-sided talks – the US, Ukraine and Russia – at the level of national security advisers.

“If such a meeting could be held now to allow for swops of prisoners of war or if a meeting of national security advisers achieves agreement on a leaders’ meeting... I cannot be opposed. We would support such a US proposal. Let’s see how things go.”

Mr Zelensky said Ukraine stood for proposals that would leave the “contact line” where it was without Ukraine having to give up territory it still controlled in the industrial region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

“For me, the fair version is we stand where we are now standing,” he said.

“This is a matter of principle. Whatever the format and however we approach the issue, it is important for us that Ukrainian authorities retain control over that part of Donbas that we control now.”

He said a US proposal to create a “free economic zone” in eastern Ukraine was a matter “to be decided by the people of Ukraine”.

“We are carefully working on every point, on every step in order to achieve not a vague ‘understanding’ about the division of territory and resources, but an agreement on stable and lasting peace and reliable security guarantees,” he said.

Mr Zelensky also said Ukraine and its European allies should continue to support the current US-led peace talks, a format that was worth “fighting for”, while adding: “If it doesn’t work out, we will all think about other options.”

He was responding to a question about remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron suggesting that Europe would have to re-engage in direct talks with Russia if the US-led efforts founder.

Mr Zelensky had earlier said that only the US was capable of persuading Russia to end the war, and he called on Washington to increase pressure on Moscow to make that happen.

“America must clearly say: if not diplomacy, then there will be full pressure... Putin does not yet feel the kind of pressure that should exist,” he said, stressing the need for more arms supplies to Ukraine and sanctions on the entire Russian economy.

Russian envoy Dmitriev wrote in an X post that he was “on the way to Miami”, adding a peace dove emoji and attaching a short video of a morning sun shining through clouds on a beach with palms.

“As warmongers keep working overtime to undermine the US peace plan for Ukraine, I remembered this video from my previous visit – light breaking through the storm clouds,” he added.

The last time Ukrainian and Russian envoys held official direct talks was in July in Istanbul, which led to prisoner swops but little else in the way of concrete progress.

Russian and European involvement marks a step forward from before, when the Americans held separate negotiations with each side in different locations.

However, it is unlikely Mr Dmitriev would hold direct talks with European negotiators as relations between the two sides remain extremely strained.

Moscow, which sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, argues that Europe’s involvement in the talks would only hinder the process and tends to paint the continent’s leaders as pro-war.

Russia presses on

The Florida talks come after President Vladimir Putin vowed to press ahead with his military offensive in Ukraine, hailing Moscow’s battlefield gains nearly four years into his war in an annual news conference on Dec 19.

Russia announced on Dec 20 it had captured two villages in Ukraine’s Sumy and Donetsk regions, further grinding through the country’s east in costly battles.

Mr Putin, however, suggested that Russia could pause its devastating strikes on the country to allow Ukraine to hold a presidential ballot – a prospect which his Ukrainian counterpart rejected.

“It is not Putin who decides when and in what format the elections in Ukraine will take place,” said Mr Zelensky, who also ruled out votes in territories occupied by Russia.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Ukraine’s Black Sea Odesa region from an overnight Russian ballistic missile strike on port infrastructure
rose to eight, with almost three dozen people wounded in the attack.

A civilian bus was struck in the attack, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said, adding that the victims “were ordinary Ukrainians”.

A series of intensified Russian strikes wreaked havoc on the coastline region in recent weeks, hitting bridges and cutting electricity and heating for hundreds of thousands in freezing temperatures.

Moscow earlier said it will expand strikes on Ukrainian ports as retaliation for targeting its sanctions-busting oil tankers.

On Dec 20, Ukraine claimed to have destroyed two Russian fighter jets at an airfield in occupied Crimea, according to the security service SBU, while Kyiv’s army said it struck a Russian oil rig in the Caspian Sea and a patrol ship nearby.

Mr Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, describing it as a “special military operation” to demilitarise the country and prevent the expansion of NATO.

Kyiv and its European allies say the war, the largest and deadliest on European soil since World War II, is an unprovoked and illegal land grab that has resulted in a tidal wave of violence and destruction. AFP, REUTERS