President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine must do all it can to ensure the war with Russia ends next year through diplomacy, commenting at a decisive moment after Donald Trump’s US presidential election win and Russia’s grinding battlefield gains. However, Zelensky said Russian President Vladimir Putin was not interested in agreeing to a peace deal, and argued it was convenient for Moscow to sit down to talk while continuing to fight.

“From our side, we must do everything so that this war ends next year, ends through diplomatic means,” Zelensky said in a Ukrainian radio interview aired on Saturday. Moscow’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva said on Thursday that Russia would be open to negotiations on an end to the war if they were initiated by Trump, although he added that these would have to acknowledge “realities on the ground”.

Moscow uses this phrase to mean Ukraine would have to cede four regions that Russian forces have partly occupied and that Russia has claimed in their entirety. Zelensky has repeatedly said since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 that peace cannot be established until all Russian forces are expelled and all territory captured by Moscow, including Crimea, is returned.

However, a return to Ukraine’s internationally recognised 1991 borders was not mentioned in the President’s “victory plan” that he publicly presented last month.

Zelensky said the war was likely to end quicker under Trump, who said often during his campaign that he would rapidly end the conflict, without giving specifics. Zelensky said US law prevented him from meeting Trump before his inauguration on January 20. “We will do everything that depends on us (to ensure a meeting). We had a really good meeting in September,” Zelensky said, adding he would only talk with Trump himself rather than any emissary.

Zelensky conceded that the situation in eastern Ukraine was difficult and Russia was making advances.

Moscow’s forces are currently bearing down on Kurakhove, which has a thermal power plant and is only 7 km from Pokrovsk, a large town which for much of the war has been one of Ukraine’s logistical lynchpins.

On the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, Russia is now advancing at the fastest rate since the war’s earliest days in 2022. Zelensky said the situation was difficult for several reasons, one of which was hold-ups of up to a year in equipping brigades, partly because of months of delay by the U.S Congress last winter in approving Ukraine aid.

However, he said some of these brigades would now enter the fray. “In order to stop the Russian army, new reserves, kitted out with the equipment we have been waiting for so long, will now arrive,” he said.

Reuters