Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will sit down on Sunday with Donald Trump 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 comes in the wake of a massive Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv. The meeting, to be hosted by Trump at his opulent Mar-a-Lago residence at 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) Sunday, according to the White House, will be the pair’s first in-person encounter since October, when the US president refused to grant Zelensky’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.
During a stopover in Canada on Saturday, Zelensky said 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 to our peace efforts. And this really showed that Putin doesn’t want peace,” he said.
While in Canada, Zelensky held a conference call 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. EU chiefs Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa, who participated in the 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.
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“They are making no secret of their plans to prepare for war with Russia,” Lavrov added. “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.”
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