By Gram Slattery, Nathan Layne and Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said he would speak to Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Tuesday morning about ending the Ukraine war, with territorial concessions by Kyiv and control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant likely to feature prominently in the talks.
“What’s happening in Ukraine is not good, but we’re going to see if we can work a peace agreement, a ceasefire and peace, and I think we’ll be able to do it,” Trump told reporters in Washington on Monday.
Trump has been trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides traded heavy aerial strikes early on Monday and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
Trump said Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region were “in deep trouble,” surrounded by Russian soldiers.
He said his freeze on military aid to Ukraine earlier this month and his contentious Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy may have helped persuade Kyiv.
“A lot of people are being killed over there, and we had to get Ukraine to do the right thing,” he said. “But I think they’re doing the right thing right now.”
Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, accused Putin of prolonging the war, saying that when the Russian leader speaks to Trump, he will have been aware of the ceasefire proposal for a week.
“This proposal could have been implemented long ago,” he said. “Every day in wartime means human lives,” he said.
Asked late on Sunday what concessions were being considered in ceasefire negotiations, Trump said: “We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants … We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
He gave no details, but appeared to be referring to the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia facility in Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear plant. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of risking an accident at the plant with their actions.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a regular briefing on Monday that Trump and Putin would discuss a power plant “on the border” of Russia and Ukraine. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Trump’s remarks about land and power plants.
The Kremlin said on Friday Putin had sent Trump a message about his ceasefire plan via U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who held talks in Moscow, expressing “cautious optimism” that a deal could be reached to end the three-year conflict.
On Sunday, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, emphasized there were still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.
Waltz was asked in an ABC interview whether the U.S. would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep Ukrainian territory it has seized, and replied: “We have to ask ourselves, is it in our national interest? Is it realistic? … Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?
‘IRONCLAD’ GUARANTEES
Zelenskiy has not responded publicly to Waltz’s remarks.
He has said he sees a good chance to end the war after Kyiv accepted the U.S. ceasefire proposal, but has also consistently said Ukraine’s sovereignty is not negotiable and that Russia must surrender the territory it has seized.
Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and controls most of four eastern Ukrainian regions after it invaded the country in 2022.
Russia will seek “ironclad” guarantees in any peace deal that NATO nations exclude Kyiv from membership and that Ukraine will remain neutral, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told Russian media outlet Izvestia in remarks published on Monday that made no reference to the ceasefire proposal.
“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement,” Izvestia cited Grushko as saying.
Moscow has also demanded that it keep control of all Ukrainian territory seized, and that the size of the Ukrainian army be limited. It also wants Western sanctions eased and a presidential election in Ukraine, which Kyiv says is premature while martial law is in force.
Putin says his actions in Ukraine are aimed at protecting Russia’s national security against what he casts as an aggressive and hostile West, in particular NATO’s eastward expansion. Ukraine and its Western partners say Russia is waging an unprovoked war of aggression and an imperial-style land grab.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said on Monday the conditions demanded by Russia to agree to a ceasefire showed Moscow does not really want peace.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said “a significant number” of nations – including Britain and France – were willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal. Defence chiefs will meet this week to firm up plans.
Russia has ruled out peacekeepers until the war has ended.
“If they appear there, it means that they are deployed in the conflict zone with all the consequences for these contingents as parties to the conflict,” Russia’s Grushko said.
“We can talk about unarmed observers, a civilian mission that would monitor the implementation of individual aspects of this agreement, or guarantee mechanisms. In the meantime, it’s just hot air.”
(Reporting by Nathan Layne, Jeff Mason, David Ljunggren, Julia Harte, Lidia Kelly and Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Bart Meijer in Brussels, Writing by Michael Perry, Gareth Jones and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Angus MacSwan, Sharon Singleton and Rod Nickel)
