Ukrainian negotiators will join a new round of talks in Florida as Russian President Vladimir Putin said some of the points in a U.S.-backed peace plan were unacceptable to him, the latest sign an agreement likely remains distant.
The negotiations are difficult, and Moscow disagrees with some of what’s been suggested by the U.S., Putin said in an interview to India Today, as cited by the state-run Tass news service. The full interview will be released later on Thursday.
Putin’s comments are likely to cast more doubt over U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to broker a peace deal after almost four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Intense shuttle diplomacy over the past few days has failed to break the deadlock as the Kremlin presses Ukraine to hand over control of land that Moscow has failed to seize by force in the east of the country. Kyiv has repeatedly rejected that demand.
Trump said Wednesday that he doesn’t know what the outcome of successive rounds of talks over a deal will be, though he called the last meeting his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, held with Putin in Moscow on Tuesday “reasonably good.”
The Kremlin earlier described the negotiations that lasted almost five hours as “very useful,” though “a compromise hasn’t been reached yet” on the critical issue of territorial control, Putin’s policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters in Moscow.
The outcome of the talks in Moscow is likely to be top of the agenda when the Ukrainian delegation led by chief negotiator Rustem Umerov meets Witkoff and Kushner in Florida on Thursday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described their previous round of talks there on Sunday as productive, but complicated.
Dignified peace
In an interview, Putin stuck to his pledge to take over parts of Ukraine which he claims should belong to Russia and said he was determined to achieve it either by force or through other means. The Russian president also repeated his complaint that Kyiv has refused to pull out of the eastern Donbas region that is internationally recognized as Ukraine’s territory.
Trump and his team kicked off their latest peace efforts with a 28-point plan, which caught other mostly European allies off guard. That initial proposal appeared to favor Russia as it pushed Kyiv to give up territory, forfeit ambitions to join NATO and cap the size of its military.
The most controversial points were subsequently whittled down to make the plan potentially more palatable for Kyiv, though its most recent iteration hasn’t yet been made public.
The U.S. recently proposed breaking down the 28-point list into four packages for further discussion, Tass cited Putin as saying in the India Today interview.
In-person and phone contacts are set to continue over the next few days as talks are proceeding quite effectively, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address Wednesday evening.
“A dignified peace is only possible if Ukraine’s interests are taken into account,” Zelenskyy said. “Right now, the world clearly feels that there is a real opportunity to end the war, and current diplomatic activity in negotiations must be backed by pressure on Russia.”
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