This week, fighting continued to rage along the front lines as the diplomatic efforts to force Russia into peace were underway.
The U.S., Russia and Ukraine don’t have a unified view on Donbas, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi told Bloomberg News on Monday. Ukraine will not surrender territory, he said after meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in London early in the week to discuss a U.S. peace plan.
EU countries’ ambassadors on Wednesday greenlit the bloc’s plan to phase out Russian gas imports by late 2027. As Trump states that Ukraine is losing the war, no reports suggest significant changes on the battlefield, CNN said. Russia and China intensify military cooperation, Zelenskyi said mid-week after hearing an intelligence report.
The latest draft of the U.S. peace plan does not bar Ukraine from joining NATO and foresees no amnesty, media reports say. Ukraine risks receiving the smallest military aid allocations this year since the invasion, the Kiel Institute warns. Ukraine and the EU reached an agreement to allow for the country’s technical progress toward accession while formal negotiations remain blocked by Hungary.
U.S. peace plan stipulates Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine’s three regions, Zelenskyi says.
The U.S. peace plan to end the war in Ukraine foresees the withdrawal of Russian forces from the parts of the regions of Sumy, Dnipro and Kharkiv they’ve seized, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi told reporters on Thursday, according to Interfax Ukraine.
While the position on Donetsk region has yet to yield agreement, “the document suggests that the Russians withdraw from some parts of [Ukraine’s other] regions they currently hold. It is what is being discussed. They will have to withdraw from swaths of Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipro regions,” Zelenskyi said.
The proposal does not demand that Russia pull back from the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, he added.
Zelenskyi also said that under the American vision, the territory in Donetsk region that Ukraine still holds would become what the Trump administration calls a “free economic zone” where no Ukrainian or Russian troops would be present. It remains unclear how this area could be managed.