Ukrainian negotiators and US officials will hold fresh talks on Washington's plan to end Russia's invasion at a meeting in Miami, a Kyiv official has said.
The two sides had been scheduled to meet in Florida yesterday in talks involving US President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, though officials have not confirmed if that meeting went ahead.
"Another meeting is expected today," Oleksandr Bevz, an advisor in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, told AFP after days of intense diplomacy on the plan.
A first draft of Washington's plan would have seen Ukraine surrendering land that Russia has not been able to win on the battlefield in return for security promises that fall short of Kyiv's aspirations to join NATO.
A new version was later hammered out by officials from Ukraine, Europe and the United States, but Moscow appeared to reject parts of it at a meeting on Tuesday.
Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
About 5,000 square km of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.
In discussions with the United States over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said that it wants control over the whole of Donbas - and that the United States should informally recognise Moscow's control.
"The diplomatic process takes place mostly behind the scenes," Mykhailo Podolyak, another of Mr Zelensky's advisors wrote on social media.
"Ukraine seeks to end the war and is ready for talks," Mr Podolyak said.
"The United States wants a pragmatic process and a quick end to the war, expecting compromises from both sides," he added.
Russia will continue its military operation in Ukraine if Kyiv refuses to negotiate a settlement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said today, according to state news agency TASS.
Meanwhile, President Zelensky thanked Mr Trump for helping to return seven Ukrainian children from Russia, adding that thousands more still needed to be brought back.
"Thank you to @POTUS and @FLOTUS for constant attention to this important matter," he wrote on X.
"Thousands of our children still must be brought back and we count on broad international support to make it possible."
