After US-Ukraine meeting in Florida, attention turns to Putin

KHARKIV, Ukraine and LONDON – President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Moscow on Monday to present a proposed peace plan to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in what is expected to be a crucial test of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

Witkoff will travel to Putin a day after participating in talks with a high-level Ukrainian delegation in Florida aimed at trying to find an agreement to end the war that Ukraine and Russia can accept. The Kremlin said on Monday that a meeting between Witkoff and Putin was scheduled for Tuesday.

“The president will hold several closed-door meetings today in preparation for Russian-American contacts,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

There is little expectation that Putin will accept a deal. The Russian leader has already signaled he will not budge and made hardline comments last week. where he reiterated his demands that Ukraine withdraw from the territory it claims and said it is “useless” to negotiate with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He suggested that the Kremlin believes it is making sufficient progress on the battlefield and is content to wait until kyiv agrees to its conditions.

Zelenskyy is expected to be in Paris today to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron, with whom he is expected to discuss negotiations with the United States. Zelenskyy and Europe appear to be signaling solidarity on a day when the United States and Putin are expected to dominate the airwaves.

“It will be a very important day,” Zelenskyy said Monday morning. “Diplomacy, defense, energy… the priorities are clear.”

Zelenskyy said on Sunday that his emissaries in Florida had reported the “main parameters” of what had been discussed, along with “some preliminary results.” But all the details have not yet been revealed, he said.

“I hope to receive a full report from our team during a personal meeting,” Zelenskyy said. saying on social networks.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday after participating in talks with Ukraine that the next steps in the negotiations were “delicate,” adding that “it’s complicated, there are a lot of moving parts.”

There was “another party involved here that will have to be part of the equation, and that will continue later this week when Mr. Witkoff travels to Moscow, although we have also been in contact to varying degrees with the Russian side,” Rubio said.

“We also understand their points of view quite well,” Rubio said.

Ukrainian and U.S. officials said the roughly two-hour meeting at the Shell Bay Golf Course in Hallandale Beach were productive, but neither party released details about the agreements that were made and there is no indication that much progress has been made on the most difficult issues that would bring an end to the war.

The meeting discussed a revised 19-point peace plan that was developed a week ago during another round of negotiations in Geneva between the United States and Ukraine. Those talks reworked an earlier 28-point plan the Trump administration had put forward that had alarmed kyiv and its European allies as strongly pro-Russia.

On Sunday, officials did not release details about whether the proposal had been updated again.

A source familiar with the talks said they had discussed security guarantees for Ukraine, as well as including the fate of billions of dollars in Russian assets frozen by Western countries and possible elections in Ukraine. The issue of frozen assets was “key” for the Russians, the source said.

However, on the crucial issue of Russia’s demand that Ukraine hand over unoccupied territory in the Donbas region, there were no signs of progress. The source said Russia was not yet willing to discuss any form of ceasefire and that Ukraine was not willing to give up territory.

Rubio said the talks had been “a very productive and useful session in which additional progress was made.”

“I think there is a shared vision here that it’s not just about ending the war, which is very important; it’s about securing the future of Ukraine, a future that we hope will be more prosperous than ever,” he told reporters after leaving talks with Rustem Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who had been the chief negotiator since kyiv.

“We worked, we already had a successful meeting in Geneva and today we continue this success,” Umerov said, adding that there will be “later stages” in the talks.

Zelenskyy said on Monday that initial reports from his team appeared to show that Sunday’s meeting had been “very constructive.”

“There are some difficult issues that still need to be resolved,” he added.

ABC News’ Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.