Reported by KAMILA HRABCHUK
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that a Ukrainian team is set to engage with representatives of U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of a new series of trilateral negotiations involving Russia. These discussions are aimed at addressing ongoing tensions.
Scheduled to occur on Thursday in Geneva, the talks will feature Rustem Umerov, the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who will be meeting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, according to Zelenskyy.
The U.S. has been actively facilitating dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, with previous meetings held in Abu Dhabi and Geneva. However, these discussions have yet to achieve significant progress in resolving the core issues, as the conflict, marked by Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, stretches into its fifth year.
The agenda for Thursday’s session includes formulating a potential postwar recovery strategy for Ukraine and setting the stage for an impending trilateral meeting with Russian representatives. President Zelenskyy also emphasized that Umerov has been instructed to explore the possibility of a prisoner swap.
Looking ahead, Zelenskyy anticipates that the U.S.-mediated talks with Russia will convene next week.
Witkoff said Tuesday he would meet Umerov in Geneva for talks that could be followed by a trilateral meeting in Florida.
The Swiss city is also expected to host a round of nuclear talks on Thursday between the United States and Iran.
Previous talks with Russia and Ukraine have largely resolved the question of security guarantees, Witkoff said. Both sides are engaging with the peace efforts, with almost daily conversations taking place between officials, he said.
Washington is not pressuring Ukraine to concede on any point, and the Russians have shown “some moderation,” Witkoff told the Yalta European Strategy — an international annual leaders’ forum organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv.
On Tuesday, amid events marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Zelenskyy noted that Russia has not defeated Ukraine nor broken the Ukrainian spirit, despite Moscow’s bigger and better equipped army and heavy bombardment of civilian areas.
Ukrainian forces have in recent months pushed Russia’s army back at points along the roughly 1,250-kilometer (750-mile) front line in eastern areas of the country, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
The “significant gains” are the biggest since 2024, the Washington-based think tank said, though they are unlikely to grow into major offensives as Ukraine struggles with a troop shortage. Even so, they likely will disrupt Russian plans for a spring-summer offensive, it said.
Ukraine has also continued its almost nightly long-range drone barrage of military and allied infrastructure targets deep inside Russia.
The U.S. State Department has expressed its displeasure with Ukraine’s recent attacks on the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea that have impacted U.S. oil interests in Kazakhstan, Kyiv’s chief envoy to Washington said Tuesday.
Four workers at the Dorogobuzh fertilizer plant, in western Russia’s Smolensk region, were killed on Wednesday in a Ukrainian drone attack that caused a fire and injured another 10 people, Gov. Vasily Anokhin said.
Ukrainian authorities said Russia attacked with 115 drones overnight, including one strike on a village in the southern Zaporizhzhia district that killed four people and injured a child, the State Emergency Service said.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
