As Trump and Zelenskyy meet in Florida, Kyiv hopes this time may be different

President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky return to the negotiating room on Sunday with a familiar and daunting task: trying once again to chart a path toward ending Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The two leaders have met three times since Trump took office for the second time in January, with each meeting raising high expectations but producing few concrete results, and at times even appearing to push a resolution further away.

As kyiv pressures Trump to provide security guarantees, questions remain about whether the Florida summit marks a real turning point or another round of high-stakes diplomatic negotiations with little to report back to Zelenskyy.

Eight months ago, a White House meeting in February ended in acrimony and failed to produce the breakthrough Trump promised on “day one” of his administration.

European leaders accompanied Zelensky on his next visit to the White House in August as they sought a voice in shaky negotiations, but Europe has since remained largely excluded from high-level talks, with Russia refusing to give in to his maximalist demands.

Signals now appear to be coming from the Ukrainian camp that kyiv may be ready to compromise with Moscow.

Zelensky said in a Telegram message on Sunday that “many things can be decided before the New Year,” but “whether decisions will be made depends on our partners.”

Last week, he laid out elements of an updated proposal that would see Ukraine withdraw its troops from parts of the east without recognizing the captured areas as Russian territory, with a demilitarized zone established in their place.

Such suggestions previously appeared to be red lines in peace talks. Until Tuesday, Zelensky had said he would not be willing to withdraw his troops from the country’s eastern industrial heartland, much of which is occupied by Russian forces, as part of a plan to end the war.

But he remained firm on another subject.

Zelensky said the question of U.S.-backed security guarantees for Ukraine, aimed at preventing further Russian incursions, would ultimately depend on the U.S. president.

“For us it is very important that there is a signal that we want legally binding security guarantees,” Zelensky told Ukrainian journalists in a question-and-answer session via WhatsApp on Saturday. “Above all, it depends on President Trump. The question is what security guarantees President Trump is prepared to offer to Ukraine.”

That said, Ukraine’s story highlights the dangers of relying on security guarantees as a long-term solution. The Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, committed the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

It was broken in 2014 by Russia. the annexation of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine, followed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago, which sparked the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.

It’s unclear whether Zelensky’s optimism is widely shared. He presented a united front with European leaders and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney after Saturday’s meetings, although there were few signs of imminent progress.

While European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said countries would work toward a “common goal,” divisions have exploded in recent weeks over since-abandoned plans to hand over seized Russian assets to Ukraine.

And it’s unclear how Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even Trump himself, will ultimately react to Zelensky’s latest peace offers.

Putin told some of Russia’s top businessmen that he might be willing to trade some territory controlled by Russian forces in Ukraine, but that he wanted full control of the Donbass region, the Kommersant newspaper reported Friday.

“Vladimir Putin said that the Russian side is still ready to make the concessions he made in Anchorage. In other words, ‘Donbass is ours’,” Kommersant reports. In essence, Putin wants the whole of Donbass, although outside this area, “a partial exchange of territories on the part of Russia is not excluded,” wrote columnist Andrei Kolesnikov.

Such uncompromising demands, championed by Putin throughout the conflict, still seem at odds with Zelensky’s path toward peace.

Although the creation of demilitarized zones remains a possibility, Zelensky said Ukraine and the United States have not found common ground in demanding that Ukraine cede the parts of Donbass it still controls.

After heavy Russian strikes hit kyiv over the weekend, killing two and wounding dozens, Zelensky said Saturday that Putin was not interested in peace, accusing him of seeking to prolong the war and “taking advantage of every opportunity to cause even more suffering to Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, Trump has remained publicly evasive. Asked about Zelensky’s visit, he told Politico: “We’ll see what he has.” »

A Ukrainian official familiar with the planning of Sunday’s meeting between Zelensky and Trump told NBC News that in addition to security guarantees for Ukraine, Ukrainians were preparing to discuss economic prosperity and reconstruction of a war-torn country.

There is also talk of holding a joint news conference with Trump and Zelensky, not necessarily to announce anything new, but to discuss the results of the meeting, the Ukrainian official said.

Yet the duo is still expected to have something new to say on Sunday, after years of stalemate and more than a million deaths.

From a European and Ukrainian perspective, “what we are talking about today has much more substance than before,” said Moritz Brake, a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Security, Strategy and Integration.

“Zelensky has clearly demonstrated his willingness to compromise, to reach some sort of agreement, especially when there is a prospect of future stability with American security guarantees,” he told NBC News. “The big question remains: Is Russia really willing to give in or accept an honest peace plan on terms also acceptable to Ukraine?”

“That’s something we can’t see at the moment,” he added.