Paul KirbyEurope digital editor
Aleksandr Gusev/SOPA ImagesUS President Donald Trump will meet Volodymyr Zelensky at Davos on Thursday, after his envoy Steve Witkoff expressed optimism about finalising a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
“I think we’ve got it down to one issue and we have discussed iterations of that issue, and that means it’s solvable,” Witkoff said ahead of his trip to Moscow for talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Witkoff did not specify the single issue but recent talks have focused on the future status of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in Donbas, with a proposal for a demilitarised and free economic zone in exchange for security guarantees for Kyiv.
“If both sides want to solve this we’re going to get it solved,” Witkoff said.
Ahead of Witkoff’s visit to Moscow with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the US president said on Wednesday that he thought both Putin and Zelensky were at a point where they could come together and get a deal done: “If they don’t, they’re stupid.”
Last week, Trump said he thought Putin was “ready to make a deal” but that Zelensky was “less ready”.
The Ukrainian president travelled through the night to get to Davos on Thursday.
He had initially called off his trip to deal with the aftermath of Russian strikes on Kyiv’s power infrastructure which have left large areas of the capital without heating, water or power during the harshest winter so far in almost four years of Russia’s full-scale war. Thousands of apartment blocks remain without heating.
There has been concern in Kyiv that Trump’s spat with his European Nato allies over the future of Greenland has deflected him from the war in Ukraine.
Zelensky said after talks with Trump in Miami late last month that a 20-point US plan to end the war was 90% ready and that Ukraine’s position on Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, was different to Russia’s.
Specifically, Zelensky has offered to withdraw troops from the 25% of Donetsk region that Ukraine still controls by up to 40km (25 miles), to create an economic zone, if Russia does the same. Russian forces have advanced slowly in the east in the past year and Putin is known to covet control of the entire region.
The other big sticking point that Zelensky highlighted last month was future control of Ukraine’s enormous Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, seized by Russia in March 2022.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that discussion with the American envoys would continue “on the Ukrainian issue and other related topics” and refused to say whether he shared Witkoff’s optimism on achieving a deal.
Putin has also not yet decided whether to join Trump’s Board of Peace on Gaza.
Ukraine’s president had hoped to sign two key documents with Trump at Davos covering future security guarantees as well as economic prosperity, but said there was “one mile left to finalise these documents”.
It is not yet clear if any signings will take place during their meeting at the World Economic Forum.
However, the head of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, Rustem Umerov, said on Wednesday night that his team in Davos had discussed the issues of economic development, post-war recovery and security guarantees with their US counterparts.
