Diplomats face an uphill battle to reconcile Russian and Ukrainian “red lines” as a renewed U.S.-led push to end the war gathers steam, with Ukrainian officials attending talks in the U.S. over the weekend and Washington officials expected in Moscow early this week.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan became public last month, sparking alarm that it was too favorable to Moscow. It was revised some following talks in Geneva between the U.S. and Ukraine a week ago.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the revised plan could be “workable.” Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a possible “basis” for a future peace agreement. Trump said Sunday “there’s a good chance we can make a deal.”
Still, officials on both sides indicated a long road ahead as key sticking points — over whether Kyiv should cede land to Moscow and how to ensure Ukraine’s future security — appear unresolved.
A look at where things stand and what to expect this week:
U.S. holds talks with Kyiv then Moscow
Trump representatives met the Ukrainian officials over the weekend and plan to meet with the Russians this week.
Ukraine’s national security council head Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces Andrii Hnatov, presidential adviser Oleksandr Bevz and others met with U.S. officials for about four hours on Sunday. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the session was productive but more work remains. Umerov praised the U.S. for its support but offered no details.
Zelenskyy’s former chief of staff and former lead negotiator for Ukraine, Andrii Yermak, resigned Friday amid a corruption scandal and is no longer part of the negotiating team. It was only a week ago that Rubio met with Yermak in Geneva, resulting in a revised peace plan.
Trump said last week that he would send his envoy Steve Witkoff to Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed Putin will host Witkoff for talks “in the first half” of the week.
Trump suggested he could eventually meet with Putin and Zelenskyy, but not until there has been more progress.
Witkoff’s role in the peace efforts came under scrutiny last week following a report that he coached Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, on how Russia’s leader should pitch Trump on the Ukraine peace plan. Both Moscow and Washington downplayed the significance of the revelations.
Where the two sides stand
Eager to please Trump, Kyiv and Moscow have ostensibly welcomed the peace plan and the push to end the war. But Russia has continued attacking Ukraine and reiterated its maximalist demands, indicating a deal is still a ways off.
Putin implied last week that he will fight as a long as it takes to achieve his goals, saying that he will stop only when Ukrainian troops withdraw from all four Ukrainian regions that Russia illegally annexed in 2022 and still doesn’t fully control. “If they don’t withdraw, we’ll achieve this by force. That’s all,” he said.
The plan, Putin said, “could form the basis for future agreements,” but it is in no way final and requires “a serious discussion.”
Zelenskyy has refrained from talking about individual points, opting instead to thank Trump profusely for his efforts and emphasizing the need for Europe – whose interests are more closely aligned with Ukraine’s – to be involved. He also has stressed the importance of robust security guarantees for Ukraine.
The first version of the plan granted some core Russian demands that Ukraine considers nonstarters, such as ceding land to Moscow that it doesn’t yet occupy and renouncing its bid to become a member of NATO.
Zelenskyy has said repeatedly that giving up territory is not an option. One of the Ukrainian negotiators, Bevz, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Ukraine’s president wanted to discuss the territory issue with Trump directly. Yermak then told The Atlantic in an interview on Thursday that Zelenskyy would not sign over the land.
Zelenskyy also maintains that NATO membership is the cheapest way to guarantee Ukraine’s security, and NATO’s 32 member countries said last year that Ukraine is on an “irreversible” path to membership. Since he took office, Trump has made it clear that NATO membership is off the table.
Moscow, in turn, has bristled at any suggestion of a Western peacekeeping force on the ground in Ukraine, and stressed that keeping Ukraine out of NATO and NATO out of Ukraine was one of the core goals of the war.
Putin seems to have time on his side
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has been under pressure at home.
Yermak’s resignation was a major blow for Zelenskyy, although neither the president nor Yermak have been accused of wrongdoing by investigators.
“Russia really wants Ukraine to make mistakes. There won’t be mistakes on our side,” Zelenskyy said. “Our work continues, our struggle continues. We don’t have a right not to push it to the end.”
An activist with Ukraine’s nongovernmental Anti-Corruption Center, Valeriia Radchenko, said letting go of Yermak was the right decision and would open a “window of opportunity for reform.”
Putin, meanwhile, seeks to project confidence, boasting of Russia’s advances on the battlefield.
The Russian leader “feels more confident than ever about the battlefield situation and is convinced that he can wait until Kyiv finally accepts that it cannot win and must negotiate on Russia’s well-known terms,” Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Center wrote on X. “If the Americans can help move things in that direction — fine. If not, he knows how to proceed anyway. That is the current Kremlin logic.”
Europe’s conundrum
NATO and the EU are holding several meetings this week focused on Ukraine. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is hosting Ukrainian Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal for talks in Brussels on Monday, and EU defense and foreign ministers are gathering to discuss European military support for Ukraine and Europe’s defense readiness.
On Wednesday, NATO foreign ministers will gather again in Brussels.
The main issue for the EU right now is what to do with the frozen Russian assets in Belgium that the Trump peace plan in its initial version sought to use for post-war investment in Ukraine.
Those funds are central to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s strategy to ensure continued help for Ukraine while also maintaining pressure on Russia. But Belgium’s prime minister is holding out, worried about the legal implications of tapping the frozen assets for Ukraine, the impact that could have on the euro — and of Russian retaliation.
The diplomacy set in motion by Trump’s peace plan “painfully exposed” Europe’s weakness, Nigel Gould-Davies of the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote in a recent commentary.
“Despite being the main source of Ukraine’s economic and military support, it is marginal to the diplomacy of the war and has done little more than offer amendments to America’s draft peace plan,” Gould-Davies wrote.
