Updated Dec. 29, 2025, 10:56 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON − Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is seeking security guarantees from the United States that could span up to 50 years as part of a potential peace settlement with Russia that the Trump administration put forward.
Zelenskyy told reporters a day after he met with President Donald Trump in Florida that the United States offered 15 years of security guarantees, but he said that he told Trump the war has been going on for nearly 15 years already and asked the administration to consider a longer commitment.
“I told him that we really wanted to consider the possibility of 30, 40, 50 years, and this would then be a historic decision by President Trump. The president said that he would think about it,” Zelenskyy said, according to Al Jazeera.
The comments came after Zelenskyy presented his version of the plan to Trump and top U.S. officials on Dec. 28 at the president’s private resort in Palm Beach. The leaders said afterward that they’d made substantial progress on a security framework but had not come to an agreement on the fate of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has seized most but not all of the land.
Russia is pushing Kyiv to retreat from areas of the region that are still under Ukraine’s control and concede the territory in any peace deal. Ukraine has indicated a willingness to turn the disputed land into a demilitarized economic zone.
The issue of who will manage the Zaporizhzhya power plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, also remains unsettled. Russia controls the power plant, which provided more than 20% of Ukraine’s energy before the war began.
Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea more than a decade ago, in 2014, and launched a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, seizing the nuclear plant and much of eastern Ukraine.
Trump has pushed Zelenskyy to make a deal to quickly end the fighting, although he said ahead of their meeting that he has no firm timeline.
At a news conference with Zelenskyy after the talks, Trump said “thorny issues” remained and it was “possible” that the conflict would not abate. The leaders spoke to the heads of several major European governments by phone for an hour after their private discussion, with another round of in-person talks potentially taking place in January.
Trump said he talked to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone for more than two hours earlier in the day and could speak to the leader again soon. He said he was on the side of “peace” and declined to chastise Putin for bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones before his summit with Zelenskyy.
The Kremlin said on Dec. 29 that another call was in the works and renewed its push for Kyiv to withdraw troops from the Donbas.
