(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Florida, President Trump said the issue of “land” remains a major sticking point in negotiations for a potential peace deal with Russia.
The initial US-drafted peace plan leaked to the media called for Ukraine to cede the territory it still controls in the Donbas, a key Russian demand, but Zelensky continues to refuse to make territorial concessions.
During a joint press conference with Zelensky at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump was asked what the “thorniest” issue was in negotiations. “The land. Some of that land has been taken, some of that land is maybe up for grabs,” he said.
Trump also suggested that Ukraine should cede the Donbas now, since it will likely lose the territory in battle as Russian forces continue to make gains. “It may be taken over the next period, a number of months, and you’re better off making a deal now,” he told reporters.
The meeting came a few days after Zelensky released his own 20-point peace proposal, which includes a point that says the battle lines in the “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts, the line of military positions on the date of signing will be recognized as the de facto front line” and does not say that Ukrainian forces will withdraw from any territory.
The Ukrainian proposal also calls for the US, NATO, and European states to provide Ukraine with an “Article 5-like” security guarantee, referring to the section of the NATO treaty that outlines mutual defense and declares that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
Zelensky said on Sunday that the US was in “100%” agreement on the security guarantees. Russia is almost certainly going to reject any arrangement where Ukraine gets a NATO-style guarantee, since a primary motive for its invasion was Ukraine’s alignment with NATO and its potential future membership, something recently acknowledged by a former Biden official.
Zelensky said that, overall, the US and Ukraine have reached agreements on 90% of the issues. “We agreed that our teams would meet as early as next week to finalize all discussed matters,” he said in a post on X after the talks.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
