Zelensky Looks to Close Out Ukraine Plan in Meeting With Trump

PALM BEACH: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will sit down with Donald Trump on Sunday and seek to secure the US president's 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 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) according to the White House, will be their first in-person encounter since October, when the US president refused to grant Zelensky's request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.

Zelensky said during a stopover in Canada on Saturday he hoped the talks would be "very constructive", and said Russian leader 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.

Europeans vow support

Zelensky 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 on Saturday.

He was also quoted by state news agency TASS as saying that "the leaders of the Kyiv regime are in no hurry to resolve this conflict peacefully."

EU chiefs Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa, who joined Zelensky's conference call, said the European Union's backing for Ukraine would never falter and vowed to maintain pressure on the Kremlin to come to terms.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told TASS that Moscow would continue its "engagement with American negotiators" and "address the root causes of the conflict", but criticized the Europeans.

"After the change of administration in the US, Europe and the European Union have become the main obstacle to peace," Lavrov said.

"They are making no secret of their plans to prepare for war with Russia," Lavrov said, adding that the ambitions of European politicians are "literally blinding them."

"Not only do they not care about Ukrainians, but they also don't seem to care about their own population," he said.

Trump has been non-committal on the new peace proposal so far, telling Politico on Friday that Zelensky "doesn't have anything until I approve it."

The talks will address a plan that would stop the war along its current front lines and could require Ukraine to pull troops back from the east, allowing the creation of demilitarized buffer zones.

As such, it contains Kyiv's most explicit acknowledgement yet of possible territorial concessions.

However, it does not envisage Ukraine withdrawing from the 20 percent of the eastern Donetsk region that it still controls -- Russia's main territorial demand.

Trump has made ending the Ukraine and Gaza wars the centerpiece of his second term as a self-proclaimed "president of peace."

But the Ukraine war has, by his own admission, proved far harder than he expected.

Security guarantees

Zelensky told reporters in Canada that security guarantees would be a focus of the Florida talks.

"Security guarantees must be simultaneous with the end of the war, because we must be confident that Russia will not start aggression again," he said.

"We need strong security guarantees. We will discuss this and we will discuss the terms."

Ukraine insists it needs more European and US funding and weapons -- especially drones.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who met with Zelensky on Saturday, announced CAN$2.5 billion (US$1.82 billion) in fresh economic assistance to help Ukraine rebuild once the war ends.

The latest Russian attack, in which 500 drones and 40 missiles pummelled Kyiv, knocked out power and heating to hundreds of thousands of residents during freezing temperatures.

Power has since been restored "to all homes in the capital", DTEK, the largest private investor in the energy industry in Ukraine, said on Sunday.

The military administration in Kherson city, just south of Kyiv, said Russia launched an attack overnight that left part of the city without electricity as well.