MOSCOW: US 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 US 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 attacked 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. US 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 metres" which he said was always the hardest.
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 of the area. Almost all countries recognise Donbas as part of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy 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. Zelenskiy said 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.
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% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% 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.
Meanwhile, Russian forces took control of the villages of Kucherivka in Ukraine's northern Kharkiv region and Rivne in the eastern Donetsk region, the Defence Ministry said on Sunday. Moscow carried out group strikes on Ukrainian transport infrastructure, fuel and energy facilities, military airfields and long-range drone complexes, the ministry added.
Russia's air defences destroyed 77 Ukrainian drones launched overnight, Russia's defence ministry said on Sunday, as both sides continue cross-border air attacks in the nearly four-year-old war. The drones were downed over seven regions in southern and central Russia and over Russian-annexed Crimea, the ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. A power transmission tower was damaged in the Rostov region bordering Ukraine about 1,000 km south of Moscow, leaving about 250 residents without electricity, Rostov Governor Yuri Slyusar said on Telegram, adding that no one was injured. Forty-two drones were destroyed over the Saratov region in southwestern Russia and 12 over the Rostov region, the defence ministry said. Russian authorities rarely disclose the extent of damage from Ukrainian air attacks and almost never confirm hits on military infrastructure. — Reuters
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