Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was to sit down with US President Donald Trump yesterday and seek to secure his stamp of approval for a new proposal to end the nearly four-year conflict with Russia.
The 20-point plan, which emerged from weeks of intense US-Ukraine negotiations, lacks Moscow’s approval, and the face-to-face in Florida follows a massive Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv.
The meeting, to be hosted by Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence at 1pm according to the White House, would be their first in-person encounter since October, when the US president refused to grant Zelenskiy’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.
Photo: AFP
Zelenskiy said on Saturday during a stopover in Canada he hoped the talks would be “very constructive,” adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin had shown his hand with the latest assault on the Ukrainian capital.
“This attack is again Russia’s answer on our peace efforts, and this really showed that Putin doesn’t want peace,” he said.
Zelenskiy held a conference call while in Canada with European leaders who, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, pledged their full support for his peace efforts.
Russia has accused Ukraine and its European backers of trying to “torpedo” a previous US-brokered plan to stop the fighting.
Adding to pressure on the battlefield, Russia announced on Saturday it had captured two more towns in eastern Ukraine, Myrnograd and Guliaipole.
“If the authorities in Kyiv don’t want to settle this business peacefully, we’ll resolve all the problems before us by military means,” Putin said.
He was also quoted by Russian state news agency TASS as saying that “the leaders of the Kyiv regime are in no hurry to resolve this conflict peacefully.”
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