Ukraine says only Trump can end war with Russia

Kyiv: Ukraine's foreign minister said the leaders of Ukraine and Russia must meet face to face to resolve the most difficult remaining issues in peace talks, adding that only U.S. President Donald Trump has the leverage to secure an agreement.

Kyiv wants to accelerate efforts to end the nearly four-year-old war and capitalise on momentum in U.S.-brokered negotiations before other factors intervene, such as campaigning ahead of the U.S. congressional midterm elections in November, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in an interview.

"Only Trump can stop the war," Sybiha told Reuters in his office in Kyiv, near the Dnipro river.


Of the 20-point peace plan underpinning recent trilateral talks, only "a few" issues remain unresolved, he said. "The most sensitive and the most difficult must be dealt with at the leaders' level."

Major gaps persist. Russia continues to demand that Ukraine cede the remaining 20% of the eastern Donetsk region it has failed to seize after years of grinding warfare, a condition Kyiv has flatly rejected. Ukraine also wants control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, which lies in Russian-occupied territory.

A second round of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi this week yielded no breakthrough, though the sides agreed to exchange 314 prisoners of war on Thursday - the first such swap since October. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that the United States had proposed another round of talks in Miami within a week, which Kyiv had accepted.

"My assessment is that we have momentum, that's true," Sybiha said in the interview conducted on Friday. "We need to consolidate and mobilise these peace efforts, and we are ready to move faster."

Nearly four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Moscow occupies almost a fifth of Ukraine's territory, including Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine seized before the war. Targeted Russian strikes have devastated Ukraine's electricity and heating networks. Analysts say Russia has gained only about 1.3% of Ukrainian territory since early 2023. Zelenskiy said on Saturday Washington hoped the war could end before summer and that Kyiv had proposed a sequencing plan, without giving details.