Something continues to move for Ukraine. American President Donald Trump appeared optimistic and Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky made it known that he wants to see him as soon as possible to untie the remaining knots before giving the green light to the proposal. Instead, as per tradition, Moscow doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to close. Indeed, according to several sources, it is ready to say no to a proposal that betrays the agreements between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Anchorage summit on August 15th.
“I think we are very close to an agreement, we will find out,” said the American president during the traditional ceremony in which he pardoned two turkeys on the eve of Thanksgiving. And while he will be at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Thanksgiving, Trump could receive a visit from Zelensky. Or at least this is the hope of the Ukrainian president. Kiev seems intent on accepting the plan after the heavy adjustments to the original 28-point proposal, especially if the further changes requested are achieved. For the moment, Ukraine has obtained the ability to have an army of 800 thousand men and not 600 thousand. But the thorny questions of the territorial concessions that Russia demands and the security guarantees for Kiev still remain, including the prospect of entry into NATO, as confirmed by Zelensky’s head of Cabinet, Andyi Yermak. And the diplomatic skills of the second row will not be enough to resolve them.
Zelensky wants to discuss this directly with Trump and is ready to fly to the United States in the next few days, when America stops for Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, at the virtual meeting of the Coalition of the Willing which was held today, and for the first time with the American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Ukrainian president reminded everyone that the war continues and that Kiev needs help to defend itself more than ever. “Russia’s war against Ukraine is not over yet, every day Russia kills our soldiers at the front and every day it strikes our cities,” he recalled. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also attended the meeting and returned to show appreciation for the ongoing negotiations and asked Russia to seize the opportunity to build peace. But also to ask that Kiev have “solid security guarantees”.
For his part, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Kiev should not have limitations on its army and assured that work is being done on this. The new 19-point version of the peace plan, agreed in Geneva, was discussed for the second day in Abu Dhabi by envoys from the United States and Russia. According to the official version, talks between the Secretary of the Armed Forces, Dan Driscoll, “are going well.”
But the rumors coming from Moscow are quite different. Russian Foreign Minister Serghei Lavrov has made it clear that Moscow will not accept anything that deviates from the original text, as reported by the Financial Times. “After Anchorage, when we thought these arrangements had been formalized, there was a long pause,” he said, and now comes “this document in which a whole series of issues, obviously, require clarification.” According to the New York Post, Russia will not only reject the text, but will point the finger at the United States by openly claiming that Trump and Putin had agreed in principle on the 28-point plan during the summit in Alaska on August 15th. And that Moscow wish list that Trump seemed to have accepted in Alaska has now been overturned.
Moscow’s strategy would be to prolong talks with Donald Trump and continue the war at least until Christmas.