Ukraine’s president holds talks in Paris as Trump’s envoy travels to Russia.
The New York Times, Dec 1
Ukraine’s priority in peace talks is getting security guarantees and maintaining its sovereignty, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday in Paris, amid a fresh round of hastily unfolding diplomatic wrangling over the U.S.-led effort to end the war with Russia.
Mr. Zelensky was in France as part of a blitz to shore up support from European allies, as all sides pushed to exert their influence in the talks about a peace proposal. He met for hours with President Emmanuel Macron and also touched base with Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Trump. Mr. Witkoff is expected to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow on Tuesday.
In Paris, Mr. Zelensky was given a warm embrace from Mr. Macron, who reiterated Europe’s commitment to supporting Ukraine and stressed that only Kyiv can make decisions about whether to cede any territory.
After stalling for months, talks about a potential peace plan got a jump-start in recent weeks, surpassing previous efforts by the Trump administration to broker an end to the nearly four-year war.
The White House has been putting pressure on Ukraine to agree to its proposal while also signaling that it was open to addressing its concerns. But the peace effort still faces serious challenges, particularly since Russia has signaled resistance to it.
Despite the renewed diplomatic efforts, there has been little indication that gaps between the sides have narrowed.
Mr. Zelensky said Monday that the current proposal — which has not been made public — “looks better” but warned that the process was “not over yet.”
“These are special days, when a great deal can truly change — and change every single day,” he said at a news conference.
“To be frank, the topic of territories is the most complicated,” he [Zelenky] added, speaking alongside Mr. Macron after they met at Élysée Palace.
The French president also cautioned that there was “no finalized peace plan to speak of at this time. He commended the United States for taking on the role of mediator, but stressed that any decisions about potential concessions must be made by Ukraine.
Ukraine is the only one that can talk about territories — it’s about its own territories, recognized by international law and sovereign,” Mr. Macron said. “When we talk about security guarantees, these cannot be talked about or negotiated if the Ukrainians, the owners of the territories, are not around the table.”
He said he hoped that coming talks between U.S. and Russian officials — an apparent reference to Mr. Witkoff’s planned meetings in Moscow — yield greater clarity about whether Russia is truly willing to work toward peace.
“When we talk about peace, everyone has a role to play,” he said. “It is up to Russia to stop the aggression, and it has given no sign, no evidence that it was willing to do so.”
Mr. Witkoff had helped craft the contentious peace plan, leaked last month, that set off the renewed diplomatic scramble.
A draft of the plan initially drew outrage from Ukraine and its European allies for echoing Russia’s maximalist demands since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Those included requiring Ukraine to withdraw from some territory and forgo NATO membership. Kyiv sought to soften parts of the proposal, leading to talks with U.S. officials in Geneva a week ago that resulted in a revised version of the plan.
The two sides set aside some of the more difficult issues for future negotiations, including limits on the size of the Ukrainian military, a proposed ban on basing NATO troops inside Ukraine, and where new boundaries between Russia and Ukraine would be drawn.
American and Ukrainian officials then met over the weekend in Florida to hammer out the details. Both sides called the latest talks constructive but said there was more work to be done, without specifying which issues remained unresolved.
Mr. Zelensky — who acknowledged earlier on Monday that there were “some tough issues that still have to be worked through” — said his discussion with Mr. Macron focused “on negotiations to end the war and on security guarantees.”
It was not immediately clear if any progress was made on those specific points during the talks in Florida or in Monday’s meetings.
Even before going to Florida, Kyiv’s negotiators had identified a number of issues that could be resolved only at a leadership level, according to a foreign policy adviser to the Ukrainian government. In particular, they highlighted Russia’s demand for Ukrainian neutrality after the war control of the eastern Donbas region and what security guarantees Europe and the United States could put in place to safeguard against a repeat Russian invasion.
Mr. Zelensky appeared to suggest that the issue of security guarantees was still very much on the table.
“We are preparing meetings in Europe,” he said Monday evening on social media. “We share the view that the war must be brought to a fair end. It is important to make progress on developing security guarantees and a long-term foundation for our resilience — for both Ukraine and Europe.”
Rustem Umerov, who led Ukraine’s delegation in Florida, was even more vague, writing on social media that the talks had “managed to achieve significant progress, although some issues require further refinement.”
He also suggested that another marathon week of diplomacy was in the cards, saying on Monday that he expected to personally present a full report to Mr. Zelensky “in the near future” at a meeting in Europe.
Mr. Zelensky is expected to travel to Ireland for talks on Tuesday.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, told reporters this “could be a pivotal week for diplomacy.” But she also expressed skepticism about Russia’s willingness to negotiate in earnest.
“They want to negotiate with those who are just offering them something on top of what they already have,” she said at a news conference in Brussels. “This is clearly their interest, but it shouldn’t be ours.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the U.S. team alongside Mr. Witkoff, has acknowledged that there is still work to be done and that any agreement reached with Ukraine would ultimately require buy-in from Russia.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday that Russia “would like to see” the war end and that “there’s a good chance we can make a deal.”
But Mr. Putin has seemed disinclined to make any concessions to Ukraine to end a war in which his troops have been advancing on the battlefield and bombarding Ukrainian cities. He has also defended Mr. Witkoff against accusations of pro-Kremlin bias.
In what appeared a show of power ahead of talks with U.S. officials, the Kremlin announced on Monday that Mr. Putin had visited a battlefield command post the previous night. Russian military commanders updated Mr. Putin about their advances and attack campaigns underway, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said.
Mr. Putin, he added, also ordered military leaders to ensure that Russian soldiers received all they would need for the coming winter.
Reporting was contributed by Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv, Ukraine, Ivan Nechepurenko from St. Petersburg, Russia, Jeanna Smialek from Brussels, Ségolène Le Stradic from Paris and Rex Sakamoto from New York.
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