Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky emerged from a Thursday meeting with one of President Trump’s envoys to announce that his nation was ready to move toward an agreement with the US to provide “effective security guarantees.”
Zelensky, 47, posted a statement on the messaging app Telegram after exiting the sit-down with special envoy Keith Kellogg, saying the “detailed” discussion included talks about the current state of the nearly three-year conflict with Russia and a plan to return prisoners of war.
“We can and must make peace reliable and lasting, so that Russia can never return to war,” Ukraine’s leader said.
“We offered the fastest and most constructive way to achieve the result. Our team is ready to work 24/7.”
The talks come as the Trump administration reportedly sent an “improved” draft for an economic agreement between the US and Ukraine for hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Kyiv’s rare-earth minerals, an official told Axios.
Zelensky’s rejection of the initial minerals agreement — and subsequent war of words with Trump after the president called him a “dictator” — appeared to stall negotiations between the nations.
National security adviser Mike Waltz earlier Thursday cautioned the Ukrainian president that his charge that Trump, 78, was propagating Russian “disinformation” by calling into question the decision to suspend Kyiv’s election last year.
“For all the administration has done in his first term … and all the United States has done for Ukraine — is just, it’s unacceptable,” Waltz said in a morning appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
“They need to tone it down,” he added, “and take a hard look and sign that deal.”
The reported offer included the US nabbing 50% ownership of Ukraine’s rare-earth deposits valued at $500 billion.
The economic discussions are related to the peace talks, Waltz told reporters at a White House briefing later, having told Fox News that the agreement was “the best security guarantee that they [Ukrainians] could hope for, much more than another pallet of ammunition.”
“Most of our weapons that have gone to Ukraine have been part of a drawdown authority where we’ve literally taken them out of our stocks, and then eventually, through appropriations, started buying them again to refill our stocks,” the national security adviser explained. “I’ll just state that there has been a lag in a lot of that process. So many of our stocks, as we look at our operations around the world, are becoming more depleted.
“That’s one of the reasons many people have had a lot of concern about: When does this end, how much is it going to take? How many lives will be lost? How much will we be how much will we spend as a member of Congress?” he asked. “We repeatedly asked the Biden administration those questions, and we never got a satisfactory answer.
“President Trump is, as we made clear to our Russian counterparts, and I want to make clear today, he’s focused on stopping the fighting and moving forward, and we can argue all day long about what’s happened in the past.”
