Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attends a bilateral meeting at the White House in Washington, 17 October 2025. Photo: EPA / Aaron Schwartz
Kyiv has accepted Washington’s proposal that the next round of peace negotiations with Russia be held in the US next week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Bloomberg News in a phone interview on Wednesday.
The Ukrainian president confirmed that two days of US-led negotiations between Russia and Ukraine would begin on 17 or 18 February, at which the creation of a free economic zone in Donbas would likely top the agenda.
The Kremlin has yet to accept the American invitation, however, and it remains to be seen if Moscow would agree to hold peace talks on US soil, Bloomberg wrote.
Though territorial issues remain the key sticking point to striking a deal between the two sides, neither Kyiv nor Moscow has revised its negotiating positions, both demanding control of the entire Donbas as well as the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
“If it is our territory — and it is our territory — then the country whose territory it is should govern it,” Zelensky told Bloomberg.
Zelensky said that “neither the Russians nor us” were “enthusiastic about the idea of a free economic zone” in Donbas, an idea proposed by US President Donald Trump’s negotiating team, but he told Bloomberg that he was ready to “return to discussions at the next meeting, and see what it might look like.”
Since the beginning of the year there have been two sets of trilateral negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the US, the second of which, while delivering no meaningful breakthrough on ending the war, resulted in the first prisoner swap between the warring sides for several months.
