Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday announced two European summits scheduled for the coming days, as he looks to capitalize on the momentum from his meeting with President Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago on Monday.
National security advisers from a variety of allied countries will meet in Ukraine on Saturday, Zelenskyy said. And French President Emmanuel Macron will hold another confab alongside European leaders in France on Jan. 6, Zelenskyy told reporters Tuesday.
“Today our group already had several calls with Americans, Steve Witkoff,” he said. “We are talking about our next steps.”
The planned meetings come after Zelenskyy and Trump presented a united front in a press conference following their Monday bilateral meeting in Florida, with the Ukrainian leader pitching a 20-point peace plan that would see the U.S. provide security guarantees to Kyiv and the country’s eastern Donbas region turned into a free economic zone.
At the press conference, Zelenskyy estimated that he and the president were “100 percent” aligned on security guarantees and “90 percent” in agreement over his broader peace plan.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions on whether it planned to send interlocutors to either of the two upcoming meetings.
And while the current draft framework allows for security guarantees to deter another Russian invasion for 15 years, Zelenskyy is pushing for protections that stretch for up to half a century.
The Ukrainian president also threw more cold water on Russian accusations that Kyiv launched drones at the home of President Vladimir Putin on Monday, blasting word of the strike as “fake” and telling reporters “no one was attacking there.”
“Is this connected with sanctions, maybe a little bit,” he said. “In my opinion, this is more connected with there being a successful meeting and positive meeting of our teams.”
But Trump indicated he believed Putin’s version of events after speaking to the Russian president on the phone Monday.
“It’s a delicate period of time,” he said. “This is not the right time. It’s one thing to be offensive, because they’re offensive. It’s another thing to attack his house. It’s not the right time to do any of that.”
