U.S. envoy says Ukraine peace deal is close, but Moscow says it wants radical changes

U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (AP Photo)

MOSCOW - U.S. President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy 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 U.S. proposals.

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.

U.S. 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 meters” which he said was always the hardest.

Donbas and nuclear power plant the key issues now

The two main outstanding issues, 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 Kellogg.

After President Vladimir Putin held four hours of Kremlin talks last week with Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said “territorial problems” were discussed.

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 (1,900 square miles) of the area. Almost all countries recognize Donbas as part of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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.

Ushakov was quoted by Russian media on Sunday as saying that the United States 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.

Zelenskyy said on Saturday that he had had a long and “substantive” phone call with Witkoff and Kushner. The Kremlin has said it expects Kushner to be doing the main work on drafting a possible deal.

Two million men killed or injured, Kellogg says

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.

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 per cent of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 per cent of Donetsk, about 75 per cent of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

A leaked set of 28 U.S. 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.

Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle.