US 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.
US President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy said a settlement to end the war was “really close”, with negotiations now centred on two unresolved questions: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the status of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 after years of clashes between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the Donbas, which includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The conflict has become Europe’s most lethal since World War Two and has deepened tensions between Russia and the West to Cold War-era levels.
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Keith Kellogg, the U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine who is set to leave his role in January, told the Reagan National Defence Forum that the push for a deal had reached “the last 10 metres”, which he described as the hardest phase.
The outstanding issues, he said, involve territorial questions chiefly the future of Donbas and the fate of the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, currently under Russian control.
“If we get those two issues settled, I think the rest of the things will work out fairly well,” Kellogg said on Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re really, really close,” said Kellogg.Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq, said the scale of the death and injuries caused by the Ukraine war was “horrific” and unprecedented in terms of a regional war.
Kellogg said that, together, Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose credible estimates of their losses. Moscow says Western and Ukrainian estimates inflate its losses. Kyiv says Moscow inflates estimates of Ukrainian losses.
Russia currently controls 19.2% of