Zelenskyy also said he wants the 20-point peace plan under discussion to be approved in a national referendum.
Washington has offered a 15-year security guarantee to Kyiv as part of a proposed peace plan, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Dec 29.
The Ukrainian leader added, however, that his preference would be for the United States to make a commitment of up to 50 years to deter Russia from any future land grabs.
“The President of the United States confirmed strong security guarantees. He confirmed the details that had been developed up to this point by our negotiating teams regarding these security guarantees, and he confirmed that they would be put to a vote by the United States Congress. This is a very strong agreement,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.
Details of the security guarantees have not been made public, but Zelenskyy said they would carry legal force and that bilateral agreements with the Europeans will also be ratified by parliaments of those countries, likewise giving those agreements the same legal force.
According to another X post by the Ukrainian leader, President Donald Trump has said he would consider extending American security guarantees beyond 15 years.
Zelenskyy also said he wants the 20-point peace plan under discussion to be approved in a national referendum.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his forces were making significant advances and breaching Ukrainian defenses as the nearly four-year-old conflict continues.
“The forces of the groups are confidently advancing, breaking through the enemy’s defenses,” he said, according to Russian state-run news agency TASS.
“Ukrainian Armed Forces units are retreating everywhere, along the entire line of contact.”
Putin added that his forces were working to “completely liberate the territory of Donbas,” a region that is proving a key sticking point in the ongoing peace negotiations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called on Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the areas of the Donbas still under its control if it wants peace.
“Of course, this is a withdrawal of the regime’s armed forces from the Donbas beyond the administrative borders,” Peskov told TASS, restating a long-held Russian position.
He refused to be drawn on the topic of a free economic zone in Kherson or the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is currently under Russian control, saying that speculation was inappropriate.
“I’ve already said here that we won’t be fully commenting on or engaging in public discussions of individual provisions,” he said in response to a question at a media briefing in Moscow.
Peskov went on to say that there would be another call between Trump and Putin in the near future.
“We don’t know how they [the negotiations between Zelenskyy and Trump] went, so we can’t assess it,” Peskov said, in response to a question about how the Kremlin viewed the outcome of the talks in Florida over the weekend.
“Following these conversations, the two presidents—I mean the Russian president and the US president—agreed to call each other again. Then we’ll get the information.”
There are currently no plans for a phone conversation between the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, Peskov added.
By Guy Birchall
