“GREAT MANY QUESTIONS”
Zelenskyy also pushed back against the idea of a unilateral Ukrainian withdrawal in the Donetsk region.
“Why doesn’t the other side of the war pull back the same distance in the other direction?” he said, adding there were “a great many questions” still unresolved.
Under the US plan, Russia would relinquish territory it has captured in the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions – three areas over which Moscow has not made a formal territorial claim.
In 2022, Russia claimed to formally annex the Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, despite not having full control over them.
Ukraine’s troops still hold around one-fifth of the Donetsk region, according to AFP’s analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War.
Much of eastern and southern Ukraine has been decimated by fighting.
Tens of thousands have been killed and millions forced to flee their homes.
Russia, which has the numerical advantage in manpower and weapons, has been grinding forward on the battlefield.
It claimed on Thursday to have captured the town of Siversk in the Donetsk region with its army advancing at its fastest pace in a year, according to AFP’s analysis.
Ukraine’s European allies were on Thursday holding a video conference to discuss the latest proposals.
United States President Donald Trump has largely sought to sideline them from the process, preferring to deal directly with Moscow and Kyiv in shuttle diplomacy led by his envoy Steve Witkoff and, lately, his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Trump on Thursday said the US will send a representative to participate in talks in Europe on Ukraine this weekend if there is a good chance of making progress on a ceasefire deal.
“We’ll see whether or not we attend the meeting,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’ll be attending the meeting on Saturday in Europe if we think there’s a good chance. And we don’t want to waste a lot of time if we think it’s negative.”
Zelenskyy said that although there was no strict deadline to finalise an agreement, Washington wanted to have the contours of a deal ready by Christmas.
“There were no specific, ultimatum-style date constraints,” he said, adding that the United States “genuinely wanted, and perhaps still wants, to have a full understanding by Christmas of where we are with this agreement.”
He also said that despite the diplomatic scramble, he saw no indication Russia wanted to halt its invasion.
“In my view, they need a pause. They need it, but they’re not taking it. I don’t see any sign that they want to end the war,” Zelenskyy said.