Volodymyr Zelensky at his office in Kyiv on 4 December 2025. Photo: Zelensky / Telegram
US President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed his disappointment with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he accused of not having read Washington’s peace proposal aimed at ending the war — which he claimed Russia was ready to accept.
Speaking to reporters at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Trump said he was “a little bit disappointed that President Zelensky hasn’t yet read the proposal. That was as of a few hours ago. His people love it, but he hasn’t”.
“Russia is, I believe, fine with [the peace plan], but I’m not sure that Zelensky’s fine with it”, Trump continued.
The White House’s draft peace settlement, which began as a 28-point plan that was criticised as essentially demanding Ukraine’s capitulation to Russia, has been the subject of intensive diplomacy in recent weeks, with Trump administration officials reducing it to 19 points amid continued meetings with delegations from both Moscow and Kyiv.
On Saturday, Zelensky hailed what he described as a “long and substantive” call to discuss the plan with Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom met with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin last week.
“We covered many aspects and went through key points that could ensure an end to the bloodshed and eliminate the threat of a new Russian full-scale invasion, as well as the risk of Russia failing to honour its promises, as has happened repeatedly in the past,” Zelensky said.
Axios reported that the call contained a “difficult” discussion of territorial issues, with the US trying to mediate Moscow’s demand for control over the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region with Kyiv’s refusal to cede its territory.
The officials did, however, make “significant progress” on US security guarantees for Ukraine, Axios said — a key point of Washington’s plan, which promised “reliable” guarantees for Kyiv but offered no details on how they may look.
On Monday, chief Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov said his delegation’s goal in three days of talks with Witkoff and Kushner in Miami last week had been to gather “complete information” on the pair’s meeting with Putin, as well as “all drafts of current proposals in order to discuss them in detail with the President of Ukraine”.
Zelensky is set to travel to London on Monday to meet with leaders of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, to coordinate a European response to the Trump administration’s push for Kyiv to accept unfavourable peace terms.
