Ukraine’s president says the US has proposed new trilateral talks in Miami, which he says Ukraine will participate in.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the US has set a June deadline for Ukraine and Russia to reach an agreement to end the nearly four-year war.
“The Americans are proposing to the parties to end the war as early as this summer and will probably put pressure on the parties to stick to this timetable,” Zelensky told reporters in Kiev on Friday, in comments barred until Saturday.
Recommended stories
3 List of itemsEnd of list
He added that President Donald Trump’s administration has insisted on a clear timeline for all events and proposed to hold the next round of trilateral talks in the US, Miami, next week. Ukraine has confirmed it will attend.
Trump had boasted that he would end the war within 24 hours of taking office. But more than 12 months later, any peace settlement remains elusive, with critics accusing Trump of manipulating Russian President Vladimir Putin to bow to the Kremlin’s war narrative and maximum demands.
The new deadline comes after US-brokered trilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi. That discussion has borne fruit A little progressBoth sides are sticking to opposing demands. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine withdraw from its heavily industrialized east Donbass The region, which includes Donetsk and Luhansk, is where the fiercest fighting is taking place. Kiev has firmly rejected this condition. Beyond that, Ukraine’s constitution also prohibits leaving the eastern region, which Russia is demanding.
However, both sides agreed 157 surrendered to prisoners of warOfficials from Ukraine and the US, as well as Russia’s Defense Ministry, confirmed the exchange on February 5. Zelensky added on Saturday that the exchange of prisoners of war with Russia would continue under the agreement.
US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, who leads the US mediation team along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, said on Thursday that while “significant work remains” in peace talks, the prisoner exchange showed that “sustained diplomatic engagement is yielding tangible results and advancing efforts to end the war in Ukraine”.
US officials have not said what action they will take if they do not meet the deadline.
‘Russia Strikes Ukraine’s Energy Sector with Drones and Missiles’
While the two sides are already at the negotiating table, Kiev argues that Russia is preferring war.
Zelensky said on Saturday that Russia launched “more than 400 drones and about 40 missiles” overnight targeting Ukraine’s energy sector.
He said Russia could choose real diplomacy every day, but instead it is launching new strikes.
“It is important for everyone who supports the trilateral negotiations to respond,” he wrote in a post on X. “Moscow must be deprived of the ability to use the cold against Ukraine.”
Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev told state media on Thursday that negotiations were moving in a “good, positive direction”.
Earlier this week, Ukrainian officials said Russia had attacked energy infrastructure 217 times this year. Minister of Energy of Ukraine, Denial Schmihlsaid 200 emergency workers were working to restore power to 1,100 buildings in Kyiv alone.
Since mid-January, Russia has targeted power stations, gas pipelines and power cables, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without heat or electricity in various locations.
On January 29, Trump said that Putin had agreed to suspend strikes on energy infrastructure for a week in case of cold weather, which the Kremlin confirmed. Despite this, Russia launched one of them on February 3 The biggest attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv, 71 missiles and 450 drones deployed.
Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said only 38 missiles were shot down, many of them ballistic. Russia claims it is targeting drone storage sites as well as defense facilities and their energy supplies.