The Ukrainian government has accepted the proposal presented by Donald Trump to end the war it has been waging with Russia since Moscow's invasion in 2022. This was confirmed by US officials to local media on Tuesday.
"The Ukrainians have accepted the peace agreement," a senior US official told CBS News.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, this source clarifies that"some minor details still need to be worked out," but that the Ukrainian side, meeting in Abu Dhabi with delegates from Russia and the US,"has accepted a peace agreement."
It is worth remembering that the initial 28-point plan presented by the Republican president, and criticized by Europe and Ukraine, had received a series of modifications after a meeting between delegations from Washington and kyiv in the Swiss capital.
Following this meeting, the US Secretary of the Army held meetings with a Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, according to US and British media reports, including ABC News and the Financial Times.
The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, was reportedly present at the talks, the Financial Times reported, without specifying which Russian officials were participating.
"Driscoll has been very involved in this peace process in recent days," an unnamed US official told the British newspaper.
"Obviously, Ukraine knows what's going on," the source added, according to the newspaper.
Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov neither denied nor confirmed the meetings."I have nothing to say. We are following the media reports," he told Russian state media.
The final version of the agreement accepted by President Volodymyr Zelensky's government is not yet known, nor are the modifications they consider necessary before official acceptance.
Meanwhile, Moscow has been reluctant to modify the original plan presented by Trump, which, according to its critics, offered many benefits to Russia. Among the most controversial points were the territorial concessions, the promise that Kyiv would never join NATO, and the limitation of Ukrainian troops to 600,000.
The Kremlin's perspective on the new agreement, which would consist of 19 points rather than 28, became clearer on Tuesday when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the Europeans of undermining Trump's plans, in a clear display of displeasure with the new text.
"They want to undermine Donald Trump's efforts, they want to remake the plan their way," Lavrov said at a press conference, in which he admitted, however, that some points of the original plan"require clarification."
The minister accused the Europeans of making as much "noise" as possible in the media to modify the 28-point plan, which included many of Moscow's demands.
"The key points of Trump's plan are based on the understandings reached in Anchorage (...) And those principles are broadly outlined in the plan, which we welcome," he said, referring to the Russian-American summit last August in Alaska.
In this scenario, multiple doubts arise as to whether President Vladimir Putin's government will accept the agreement, which now has Ukraine's backing, or whether it will reject it in an effort to obtain more benefits, similar to those it had in the original 28-point text.
In this regard, The Washington Post states that"Russia is unlikely to accept the changes in the new peace plan." This is because Putin himself stated that the original plan should be the "basis" for the text that ends the war.
