MIAMI \u2014 A Kremlin envoy will travel to Florida to discuss a U.S.-proposed plan to end the war in Ukraine, a U.S. official said Thursday as European Union leaders weighed a major loan to help the Ukrainian government.<\/p>\n
Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund, is set to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump\u2019s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in Miami on Saturday, according to an American official who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview a meeting that hasn\u2019t yet been publicly announced.<\/p>\n
The official said that Witkoff and Kushner will sit down with Dmitriev, after meetings with Ukrainian and European officials in Berlin earlier this week, in which they discussed U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv, territorial concessions and other aspects of the American-authored plan aimed at ending the war.<\/p>\n
Asked about the meeting in Miami, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Moscow was preparing for contacts with the U.S. to learn about the results of the meetings in Berlin, but didn\u2019t give further details.<\/p>\n
Trump has unleashed an extensive diplomatic push to end nearly four years of fighting following Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began on Feb. 24, 2022, but Washington\u2019s efforts have run into sharply conflicting demands by Moscow and Kyiv.<\/p>\n
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Wednesday that Moscow would seek to extend its gains in Ukraine if Kyiv and its Western allies reject the Kremlin\u2019s demands in peace talks.<\/p>\n
Putin wants all the areas in four key regions captured by his forces, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014, to be recognized as Russian territory. He also has demanded that Ukraine withdraw from some areas in eastern Ukraine that Moscow\u2019s forces haven\u2019t captured yet.<\/p>\n
The Kremlin also insists that Ukraine abandon its bid to join NATO and warns that Moscow won\u2019t accept the deployment of any troops from NATO members and will view them as a \u201clegitimate target.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed readiness to drop Ukraine\u2019s bid to join the trans-Atlantic alliance if the U.S. and other Western nations give Kyiv security guarantees similar to those offered to NATO members. But Ukraine\u2019s preference remains NATO membership as the best security guarantee to prevent further Russian aggression.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Zelenskyy has rejected Moscow\u2019s demands that it pull back its troops from other areas that Russia hasn\u2019t been able to take by force.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian officials were expected to hold negotiations in the U.S. on Friday and Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have progress in our dialogue with the American side regarding some of our points, they also speak with Russian side,\u201d Zelenskyy said during a visit to Brussels where EU leaders were set to decide whether to use tens of billions of euros in frozen Russian assets to underwrite a loan to meet Ukraine\u2019s military and financial needs over the next two years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are in the war and United States are decision-makers, who can really stop Putin and I count on this,\u201d Zelenskyy said. \u201cI really count on pressure from United States. Putin does not want to stop this war, but he can if United States will pressure more.\u201d<\/p>\n
As European allies gathered for the high-stakes summit, Russia and Ukraine exchanged more aerial attacks.<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s air force said that Russia fired 82 drones of various types at Ukraine overnight, 63 of which were intercepted or jammed.<\/p>\n
In Cherkasy, Russian drones that targeted critical infrastructure wounded six people and left parts of the city without electricity, regional administration head Ihor Taburets said. Russian drones also wounded four people in Kryvyi Rih and seven near Odesa, according to local officials.<\/p>\n
In Russia\u2019s Rostov region, three people were killed by Ukrainian drones overnight, including two crew members of a cargo ship that was hit in Rostov-on-Don and another man who died in Bataysk. At least 10 others were wounded, according to local officials.<\/p>\n
The Russian Defense Ministry said that its air defenses intercepted 47 Ukrainian drones overnight.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Matthew Lee in Washington, and Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Follow AP\u2019s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/russia-ukraine<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI \u2014 A Kremlin envoy will travel to Florida to discuss a U.S.-proposed plan to end the war…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226],"class_list":{"0":"post-88535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hialeah","8":"tag-hialeah","9":"tag-hialeah-headlines","10":"tag-hialeah-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}