The Ukrainian government said on Thursday it is ready to join “draft” proposals prepared by the United States to end the ongoing Russian aggression.
But other senior officials in Kiev have called all suggestions “absurd” and “provocative”.
“The President of Ukraine has officially received from the US side a draft plan which, according to the US side’s assessment, could strengthen diplomacy,” Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said in a statement.
“We now stand ready to work constructively with the American side and our allies in Europe and around the world to achieve peace.”
In a post on Telegram after meeting with US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll in Kiev, Zelensky said Ukrainian and US teams would “work on points of a plan to end the war.”
The exact proposals have not been published, but media outlets including the AFP news agency have reported that the plan echoes many of Russia’s maximalist demands to end the war, including giving up territory that is still controlled by Ukraine.
After a meeting with US military officials in Kiev, Zelensky’s office said it was “agreed to work on planning points to ensure an honorable end to the war,” but other senior Ukrainian figures rejected the proposals.
“There is nothing concrete about this next ‘peace plan’,” Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign policy, told the Ukrainian Interfax news agency, adding that suggestions were “a Russian provocation to disorient Ukraine’s allies and incite society.”
He accused US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kremlin representative Kirill Dmitriev, who reportedly drafted the proposal, of “putting forward this absurd plan to remind people of their existence and pretend that they are doing something.”
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s First Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergiy Kislitsya, dismissed suggestions of peace proposals as “unrealistic.”