US President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy has said a deal to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and depended on resolving just two major issues but the Kremlin said there had to be radical changes to some of the US proposals.
Mr Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker” president, says that ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two has so far been the most elusive foreign policy aim of his presidency.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
US Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, who is due to step down in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict were in “the last 10 metres” which he said was always the hardest.
Donbas and nuclear plant key issues
The two main outstanding issues, Mr Kellogg said, were on territory – primarily the future of the Donbas – and the future of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which is under Russian control.
“If we get those two issues settled, I think the rest of the things will work out fairly well,” Kellogg said on Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re really, really close,” said Mr Kellogg.
After President Vladimir Putin held four hours of Kremlin talks last week with Mr Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Mr Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said “territorial problems” were discussed.
Keith Kellogg said the two main issues were on territory and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant
That is Kremlin shorthand for Russian claims to the whole of Donbas, though Ukraine is still in control of at least 5,000 square km of the area.
Almost all countries recognise Donbas as part of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that handing over the rest of Donetsk would be illegal without a referendum and would give Russia a platform to launch assaults deeper into Ukraine in the future.
Mr Ushakov was quoted by Russian media as saying that the US would have to “make serious, I would say, radical changes to their papers” on Ukraine.
He did not clarify what changes Moscow wanted Washington to make.
Mr Zelensky said yesterday that he had had a long and “substantive” phone call with Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner.
The Kremlin has said it expects Mr Kushner to be doing the main work on drafting a possible deal.
Two million killed or injured, says Kellogg
Mr Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq, said the scale of the death and injuries caused by the Ukraine war was “horrific” and unprecedented in terms of a regional war.
Mr Kellogg said that, together, Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose credible estimates of their losses.
Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
A leaked set of 28 US draft peace proposals emerged last month, alarming Ukrainian and European officials who said it bowed to Moscow’s main demands on NATO, Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine and restrictions on Ukraine’s army.
Volodymyr Zelensky has said that handing over the rest of Donetsk would be illegal
Kremlin welcomes end to ‘direct threat’ label in US strategy
Meanwhile, the Kremlin welcomed a move by the Trump administration to revise its national security strategy and stop calling Russia a “direct threat,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in remarks published by the TASS news agency on Sunday.
Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. strategies have designated Moscow as a major threat.
However, the updated US policy, announced on Friday, adopts a softer tone, urging limited cooperation.
In comments to the state-run news agency, Mr Peskov said the updated strategy dropped wording that described Russia as a direct threat and instead called for cooperation with Moscow on strategic stability issues.
“We considered this a positive step,” he said, adding that Moscow would examine the document closely before drawing broader conclusions. “We certainly need to look at it more closely and analyse it,” Peskov was quoted as saying.
It comes as Russian forces launched an overnight combined air strike on infrastructure in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, causing power and water outages, according to its mayor Vitalii Maletskyi said.
Dmitry Peskov said the US change in national security strategy was a positive step
Mr Maletskyi said in a social media post that details of consequences of the strike would be released later after damage assessment is completed.
City services were working to restore electricity, water and heating in districts where supplies were disrupted, he added.
Russia has intensified long-range strikes on Ukraine’s power, heating and water infrastructure ahead of winter and seeking to sap public morale and disrupt industry after previous cold seasons in the nearly four-year war saw nationwide blackouts and emergency rationing.
A photo posted by the mayor showed a large blaze engulfing what looked like industrial buildings at night.
“We will restore everything,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Russia said its air defences destroyed 77 Ukrainian drones launched overnight, as both sides continue cross-border air attacks in the nearly four-year-old war.
The drones were downed over seven regions in southern and central Russia and over Russian-annexed Crimea, Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.