German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and French President Emmanuel Macron, meet at 10 Downing Street, London, 8 December 2025. Photo: Zelensky / Telegram
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that his negotiating team had managed to cut down US President Donald Trump’s peace plan to end the war from 28 to 20 points after securing the removal of terms that were unfavourable to Ukraine.
“There were 28 points, now there are 20. We have aligned this direction, and openly non-pro-Ukrainian points have been removed”, Zelensky said in comments reported by news agency Interfax-Ukraine.
He added that while US negotiators were eager to reach a compromise, “complex issues” regarding territory remained.
Despite Trump’s claim that Zelensky had not read the peace proposal, the Ukrainian leader spent Monday discussing the document with Kyiv’s European allies, meeting first with the heads of the UK, France and Germany in London before travelling to Brussels for talks with NATO and EU leaders.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian president is expected to meet with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Pope Leo XIV in Rome before sharing an updated version of the peace plan with the US.
Zelensky reiterated on Monday that his government had no intention of surrendering land to Russia as part of any peace deal — so far the central point of contention between Moscow and Kyiv — despite reports of mounting White House pressure to do so.
“Do we envision ceding territories? We have no legal right to do so, under Ukrainian law, our constitution and international law. And we don’t have any moral right either,” he told reporters.
Citing two unnamed Ukrainian officials, Axios reported that US negotiators were pushing Zelensky “much harder” to accept their peace proposal than they were pushing Vladimir Putin, with the issue of control over eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and US security guarantees for Kyiv remaining major sticking points through three days of talks between Ukrainian and US delegations in Miami last week.
Those talks culminated in a call with Zelensky in which Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner tried to “sell us in different ways the Russian desire to take the whole of Donbas”, one official told Axios, “and the Americans wanted Zelensky to accept all of it in the phone call”.
