 "Ukraine peace deal ‘really close’ as talks hinge on Donbas and nuclear plant, says US envoy")
US President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy said a settlement to end the war was “really close”, with negotiations now centred on two unresolved questions: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the status of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 after years of clashes between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, which includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The conflict has become Europe’s most lethal since World War Two and has deepened tensions between Russia and the West to Cold War-era levels.
Keith Kellogg, the U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine who is set to leave his role in January, told the Reagan National Defence Forum that the push for a deal had reached “the last 10 metres”, which he described as the hardest phase.
The outstanding issues, he said, involve territorial questions chiefly the future of Donbas and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, currently 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.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.
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View AllKellogg 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. Moscow says Western and Ukrainian estimates inflate its losses. Kyiv says Moscow inflates estimates of Ukrainian 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.
Those proposals, which Russia now says contain 27 points, have been split up into four different components, according to the Kremlin. The exact contents are not in the public domain.
Under the initial U.S. proposals, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, whose reactors are currently in cold shutdown, would be relaunched under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the electricity produced would be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that he had had a long and “substantive” phone call with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The Kremlin said on Friday it expected Kushner to be doing the main work on drafting a possible deal.
With inputs from agencies
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