The comments come as the Kremlin criticized plans by France and the UK to send peacekeepers to Ukraine after the ceasefire.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said an agreement on security guarantees from Washington is now “absolutely ready” to be finalized by US President Donald Trump, days after negotiations in Paris.
In a post on X on Thursday, Zelensky said the document — the cornerstone of any deal to end the war, which Washington and other Western allies would back Ukraine if Russia invades again — is almost done.
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“The bilateral document on security guarantees for Ukraine is now essentially ready to be finalized at the highest level with the President,” he said.
He said the talks in Paris, which included teams from the US and Europe, resolved “complex issues” within the framework of talks to end the nearly four-year war, with the Ukrainian delegation presenting possible solutions.
“We understand that the American side will be engaged with Russia and we are waiting for feedback on whether it is really willing to end the war of aggression,” he said.
Washington, which on Tuesday endorsed the idea of providing security guarantees for Ukraine for the first time, is expected to submit any agreement reached by Kiev to Moscow in an effort to end the conflict.
Kiev says a ceasefire requires legally binding assurances that its allies will come to its defense to deter Moscow from future aggression.
But specific details of the guarantees and how Ukraine’s allies would respond have not been made public.
Zelensky said earlier this week that he had not yet received an “unequivocal” answer about what he would do if Russia attacked again.
Russia condemned the peacekeeper plan
Zelensky’s comments came as Russia rejected plans to deploy European peacekeepers in Ukraine from the Paris talks as “militarists” and warned they would be treated as “legitimate military targets”.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer Signed a declaration of intent With Zelensky in Paris, they set the framework for deploying their countries’ troops to Ukraine after the ceasefire with Russia.
But in Russia’s first comments in response to the plan, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed the proposal as “dangerous” and “subversive,” dashing hopes that the plan could prove a step toward ending the war.
“The so-called Alliance of the Willing and the Kiev regime’s new military declarations together form an ‘axis of war,'” Zakharova said in a statement.
“All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian armed forces,” she said, repeating an earlier threat by Putin.
Moscow has repeatedly warned that it will not accept any NATO member sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
Russia attacked energy infrastructure
In his social media post, Zelensky called for more pressure on Russia from supporters of Ukraine, the next Russian Missile attacks on energy infrastructureWhich, he said, “does not clearly indicate that Moscow is rethinking its priorities”.
“In this regard, the pressure on Russia must be increased by intensifying the work of our negotiating teams.”
The attacks left Ukrainian authorities scrambling to restore heat and water to hundreds of thousands of homes in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia regions.
“This is truly a national-level emergency,” Boris Filatov, mayor of Dnipro, the capital of Dnipropetrovsk, said on Telegram.
He announced that “power is slowly returning to hospitals” after blackouts forced them to run on generators. The city authorities have also extended school holidays for children.
About 600,000 households in the Dnipropetrovsk region were without power, Ukrainian energy company DTEK said.