United States President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy said a deal to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and now depended on resolving two main outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
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.
The Ukraine war is the deadliest European conflict since World War Two and has triggered the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
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.
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 two 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 per cent of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80 per cent of Donetsk, about 75 per cent of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
A leaked set of 28 US 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 US 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 Zelenskiy 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.
