US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were “getting a lot closer, maybe very close” to an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, while acknowledging that the fate of the disputed Donbas region remains a key unresolved issue.
The two leaders spoke at a joint news conference after meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Sunday afternoon. Both leaders reported progress on two of the most contentious issues in peace talks – security guarantees for Ukraine and the division of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region that Russia has sought to capture.
Both Trump and Zelensky offered few details and did not provide a deadline for completing a peace deal, although Trump said it will be clear “in a few weeks” whether negotiations to end the war will succeed. He said a few “thorny issues” around territory must be resolved.
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Zelensky said an agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine has been reached. Trump was slightly more cautious, saying that they were 95 per cent of the way to such an agreement, and that he expected European countries to “take over a big part” of that effort with US backing.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in an X post published after Trump met with Zelensky, said progress was made on security guarantees. Macron said countries in the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” would meet in Paris in early January to finalise their “concrete contributions”.
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