Zelensky Expresses Wary Optimism About Russia-Ukraine Peace Plan

Two days of talks between President Volodymyr Zelensky and allies have brought some progress on security guarantees, but Russia remains opposed to any foreign forces in Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine expressed a tense and wary optimism on Tuesday about proposed guarantees for Ukraine’s future security, so long as they were detailed and confirmed by the U.S. Congress. But what might make them acceptable to Ukraine, he suggested, would prompt Russia to reject them.

Mr. Zelensky spoke after two days of peace proposal talks with U.S. and European negotiators, who had emphasized progress on Monday and promoted what they called a NATO-like security agreement. Mr. Zelensky acknowledged that the United States had gone a long way to spelling out what kind of security guarantees it might offer Ukraine in any peace deal, but he added that significant details had still to be worked out. Russia has not been involved in this round of negotiations.

“You and I are people of war, and during war we believe in facts,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview over social media with Ukrainian journalists early Tuesday morning. Those comments came as the Ukrainian president flew from Berlin after the talks, which took place with the Trump administration representatives Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and with European officials.

Mr. Zelensky’s comments, directed to his compatriots, were more cautious than his remarks in a news conference Monday evening with Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. Then, Mr. Zelensky — as always — made a point of thanking President Trump and his envoys for trying to bring peace to Ukraine and for working to secure its future against further Russian aggression.

The Ukrainian president has said that security guarantees from Europe and the United States are a precondition for his country to make any territorial concessions, and the guarantees and territory lines have emerged as the two major sticking points in the talks.

Mr. Zelensky described even that sort of trade as a “painful” compromise to which he has not yet agreed. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has insisted that Kyiv give up the 14 percent or so of the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, that Russia has not yet conquered, a demand that Trump officials have supported.

American efforts to find some sort of solution, like turning the area into a demilitarized zone, have not convinced Mr. Zelensky. He argues that even if Ukrainian forces withdraw from the Donbas, Russian forces will not, and thus such an arrangement is unacceptable.

“There was enough dialogue on the territory,” Mr. Zelensky said at the Monday news conference in Berlin. “And it seems to me that so far we have different positions, to be honest, but I think that my colleagues have heard my personal position.”

That’s why he is insisting, with European support, on the security guarantees. But the stronger those guarantees, the more likely Russia will be to reject them as a tenet of a cease-fire deal.

And there is still a lot of work to be done on the guarantees even to satisfy Kyiv, said a senior Ukrainian official who was not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions.

European leaders expressed some optimism after the Berlin talks that Washington was taking on board Ukrainian and European concerns.

“For the first time, I heard from the mouths of American negotiators that America would engage in security guarantees for Ukraine in such a way that the Russians would have no doubt that the American response would be military if the Russians attacked Ukraine again,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland said.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of Sweden said in a statement that security guarantees had become “clearer and more credible,” which he called an important step toward sustainable peace. “But many difficult questions remain, not least about territories and whether Russia wants peace at all,” he added.

For example, the Europeans and Americans also agreed to establish a Europe-led and Washington-supported postwar troop presence in Ukraine to “assist in the regeneration of Ukraine’s forces, in securing Ukraine’s skies, and in supporting safer seas, including through operating inside Ukraine,” according to a joint European statement issued late on Monday.

But Russia has consistently rejected the prospect of a settlement that allows the presence inside Ukraine of any NATO member troops. And not all European countries are prepared to put boots on the ground there in any circumstance.

On Tuesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei A. Ryabkov of Russia said that Moscow was not willing to make territorial concessions in talks on ending the Ukraine war, the state news agency Tass said. Mr. Ryabkov was talking about the Donbas, as well as Crimea and the parts of eastern Ukraine that Moscow calls “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” Tass noted.

In the reported comments, Mr. Ryabkov said that foreign troops in Ukraine would be a red line for Moscow: “We are open to discussing possible solutions. However, under no circumstances are we prepared to support, approve, or even tolerate any NATO troop presence on Ukrainian territory.”

When asked about the potential deployment of European forces in Ukraine outside of the NATO framework, Mr. Ryabkov added, “No, no, and no again.”

Across Ukraine, Russia’s escalation of drone and missile attacks has driven up civilian casualties by almost a quarter this year, the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, said on Tuesday in Geneva.

In addition to concerted strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, attacks by Russian drones on civilians riding on bicycles, in public buses or in cars had killed around 300 people, he told the Human Rights Council. Summary executions of Ukrainian servicemen by their Russian captors had also risen since the middle of last month, Mr. Türk said. His office had assessed reports of the execution of 14 Ukrainian prisoners of war as credible and was investigating 10 other cases.

Russia had reported 146 civilians killed and 1,150 injured by Ukrainian attacks on its territory since December 2024, Mr. Türk noted, but the United Nations had no way to verify the figures.

Mr. Zelensky has his own doubts about whether the United States and Europe would really go to war against Russia if a peace deal broke down, given their refusal to fight for Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in 2022.

But he also expressed the hope that “if Putin rejects everything,” the United States would impose additional sanctions on Moscow and provide Ukraine with more weapons to continue the fight.

In the past, Mr. Trump has tended to swing from blaming Mr. Zelensky for holding up a deal to blaming Mr. Putin and back again. The Ukrainians and Europeans have been trying to turn an original 28-point outline for peace worked out between Mr. Witkoff and a senior Russian official, Kirill Dmitriev, into an agreed proposal that Kyiv could accept.

Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting from Berlin, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

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