Keith Kellogg, US President Donald Trump’s envoy to Ukraine, said a deal to end the war was “very close” and depended on resolving just two key issues, but the Kremlin said there needed to be radical changes to some of the US proposals.
Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker” president, says ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II has so far been the most elusive foreign policy goal 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.
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Kellogg, who is expected to leave office in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict were in the ‘last 10 yards’, which he said had always been the most difficult.
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The two main outstanding issues, Kellogg said, are on the territory – mainly the future of the Donbas – and the future of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe, which is under Russian control.
“If we can resolve those two issues, I think the rest of the things will work out very well,” said Kellogg, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re very, very close,” says Kellogg
After President Vladimir Putin held four hours of talks in the Kremlin last week with Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said “territorial issues” were discussed.
That’s Kremlin shorthand for Russia’s claims to all of Donbas, although Ukraine still controls at least 5,000 km² (1,900 square miles) of the area. Almost all countries recognize Donbas as part of Ukraine.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said handing over the rest of Donetsk would be illegal without a referendum and would give Russia a platform to launch deeper attacks 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 its documents’ on Ukraine. He did not clarify what changes Moscow wanted Washington to make.
Zelensky said on Saturday that he had had a long and “substantial” telephone conversation with Witkoff and Kushner. The Kremlin said it expects Kushner to be doing the main work in crafting a possible deal.
