Ukraine is ready for peace talks but is not prepared to withdraw its troops from additional territory first, as Russia has demanded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Oct. 28.
Plans for a summit in Budapest this month between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were put on hold after Moscow held firm in its demands, including that Ukraine cede more territory as a condition for a cease-fire.
In comments to reporters, Zelenskyy said he was happy for talks to be held anywhere outside of Russia or Moscow’s close ally, Belarus.
Ukrainian and European officials are due to meet at the end of the week to discuss details of a cease-fire plan, Zelenskyy said, after meeting the visiting Dutch foreign minister David van Weel.
“It is not a plan to end the war. First of all, a cease-fire is needed,” Zelenskyy said.
“This is a plan to begin diplomacy. … Our advisers will meet in the coming days, we agreed on Friday or Saturday. They will discuss the details of this plan.”
Proposed Peace Talks in Hungary
Trump has backed Ukraine’s call for an immediate cease-fire on current lines.
Speaking to reporters on Oct. 27, Zelenskyy said he was happy to attend peace talks in Hungary, despite his reservations about some of the positions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who, he said, “blocks everything for Ukraine.”
“If there will be results, then God bless—let the talks take place anywhere,” he said. “It almost doesn’t matter, just not in Russia, of course, and definitely not in Belarus.”
Zelenskyy called on the United States to pass tougher restrictions on Russia after Trump imposed sanctions on Moscow’s two biggest oil companies.
Continued Funding Needed
Ukraine would need continued funding from its European allies for another two or three years, Zelenskyy said.
The European Commission says that since the start of the conflict, the European Union has given 177.5 billion euros ($205.7 billion) to Ukraine, while the United States provided 113.7 billion euros ($132.4 billion) up until January.
In his Oct. 28 remarks, Zelenskyy said he hoped for China’s help to end the war by using its influence on Moscow.
“We would like very much for China to put pressure on Russia to end this war and not to assist its continuation in any way,” he said.
Trump spoke on Oct. 29 at a summit of world leaders in Asia. Fresh from his involvement in the fragile cease-fire in the Middle East and in helping broker an accord between Thailand and Cambodia at the ASEAN summit, he said he believes there will be a resolution to the Russia–Ukraine conflict.
“The only one I didn’t do is Russia–Ukraine. But that will get done, we’ll get that done too. I thought that was going to be an easy one because of my relationship with President Putin. It turned out to be a little different. But I think it will get done,” Trump said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in South Korea.
He added that the war “would have never started” if he had been president at the time the conflict escalated in February 2022, after Moscow launched a wider invasion of its neighbor, which Putin said was due to the persecution of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. He also said that Ukraine’s deepening ties to NATO posed a threat to Russia.
Russian Response
According to Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti, Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Moscow hopes that Trump wants a lasting peace solution and does not seek to create conditions for supplying weapons to Ukraine.
“We very much hope that Donald Trump wants a truly sustainable peace, and [is] not creating conditions for continued injections of weapons and money into the Kyiv regime, so that it would not abandon its efforts, [and] be a tool of the Europeans, in the war against the Russian Federation,” Lavrov said on Oct. 28.
Speaking about the stalled plans for a meeting in Budapest, Putin said during an Oct. 23 press conference: “The president of the United States has decided to cancel or postpone this meeting. … What can I say? Dialogue is always better than any kind of confrontation, disputes, or, even more so, war. That’s why we have always supported continuing dialogue, and we still support it now.”
Reuters and Evgenia Filiamonova contributed to this report.
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