Ahead of his Sunday meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is training his focus on the security guarantees his country can extract from American interlocutors as both Kyiv and the White House look to end Russia’s nearly four-year-long war in Ukraine.
Overnight, Russia lobbed about 40 missiles — and nearly 500 drones — at Kyiv in a barrage that left major swaths of the capital city without power and killed at least one civilian. It’s a show, Zelenskyy said, of why Ukraine needs ironclad security guarantees from international partners to feel comfortable putting down its weapons.
And Trump, he said, is the decider-in-chief.
“It is very important for us that there is a signal that we want legally binding security guarantees,” Zelenskyy told reporters. “And this depends primarily on President Trump. The question is what security guarantees President Trump is ready to give to Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian president’s visit to Florida comes at a pivotal time, with Trump in recent weeks showing increasing frustration that his efforts at peace have so far been in vain. En route, Zelenskyy will stop in Canada on Saturday to meet with Prime Minister Mark Carney, and will speak online with European leaders to review the issues on the table. Zelenskyy will bring to the Florida talks a 20-point peace plan, which includes a demilitarized zone. He and Trump are expected to discuss the future of both the pivotal Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and Ukraine’s Donbas region.
But Trump sounded skeptical in an exclusive Friday call with POLITICO.
“He doesn’t have anything until I approve it,” he said. “So we’ll see what he’s got.”
Zelenskyy also pushed back on Trump’s call for new elections in Ukraine, which the U.S. president promoted in an exclusive interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns at the beginning of the month. A referendum “certainly cannot be done in the conditions in which we live today,” Zelenskyy told reporters, owing to the likelihood of Russian interference.
Earlier in December, Zelenskyy claimed he was willing to overturn a Ukrainian law that banned elections during martial law, provided that the U.S. and Europe could attest to the security of any vote.
“I have always said: I am not clinging to the chair; we are ready for this,” Zelenskyy said on Saturday. “I am politically ready, but we must be legally prepared so that the elections can later be recognized as legitimate. The second issue is security.”
