United States President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy said a deal to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and depended on resolving just two major issues but the Kremlin said there had to be radical changes to some of the US proposals.<\/p>\n
Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker” president, says that ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II has so far been the most elusive foreign policy aim of his presidency.<\/p>\n
ussia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.<\/p>\n
US Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, who is due to step down in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict were in “the last 10m” which he said was always the hardest.<\/p>\n
“If we get those two issues settled, I think the rest of the things will work out fairly well,” Kellogg said on Saturday (Dec 6) at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”<\/p>\n
“We’re really, really close,” said Kellogg.<\/p>\n
After President Vladimir Putin held four hours of Kremlin talks last week with Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said “territorial problems” were discussed.<\/p>\n
That is Kremlin shorthand for Russian claims to the whole of Donbas, though Ukraine is still in control of at least 5,000 sq km of the area. Almost all countries recognise Donbas as part of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that handing over the rest of Donetsk would be illegal without a referendum and would give Russia a platform to launch assaults deeper into Ukraine in the future.<\/p>\n
Ushakov was quoted by Russian media on Sunday as saying that the US would have to “make serious, I would say, radical changes to their papers” on Ukraine. He did not clarify what changes Moscow wanted Washington to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
United States President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy said a deal to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and depended on resolving just two major issues but the Kremlin said there had to be radical changes to some of the US proposals. Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker” president, says that ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II has so far been the most elusive foreign policy aim of his presidency. ussia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19466,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19464\/revisions\/19466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}