All eyes on peace proposal ahead of Trump-Zelenskyy meet in US

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will sit down with Donald Trump and seek to secure the US president's stamp of approval for a new proposal to end the nearly four-year conflict with Russia.

The 20-point plan, which emerged from weeks of intense US-Ukraine negotiations, lacks Moscow's approval, and the face-to-face in Florida follows a massive Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv.

The meeting, scheduled for 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) Sunday will be their first in-person encounter since October, when the US president refused to grant Zelenskyy's request for long-range Tomahawk missiles.


Shortly before the scheduled meeting, Trump said he had a productive call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. "I just had a very good and productive telephone call with President Putin of Russia."

Zelenskyy said during a stopover in Canada on Saturday he hoped the talks would be "very constructive", and said Putin had shown his hand with the latest assault on the Ukrainian capital. "This attack is again Russia's answer on our peace efforts. And this really showed that Putin doesn't want peace," he said.

Europeans vow support
Zelenskyy held a conference call while in Canada with European leaders who, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, pledged their full support for his peace efforts. Russia has accused Ukraine and its European backers of trying to "torpedo" a previous US-brokered plan to stop the fighting.

Adding to pressure on the battlefield, Russia announced on Saturday it had captured two more towns in eastern Ukraine, Myrnograd and Guliaipole.

"If the authorities in Kyiv don't want to settle this business peacefully, we'll resolve all the problems before us by military means," Putin said on Saturday. He was also quoted saying that "the leaders of the Kyiv regime are in no hurry to resolve this conflict peacefully."

EU chiefs Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa, who joined Zelenskyy's conference call, said the bloc's backing for Kyiv would never falter and vowed to maintain pressure on the Kremlin.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow would continue its "engagement with American negotiators," but criticized the Europeans. "After the change of administration in the US, Europe and the EU have become the main obstacle to peace," Lavrov said.