US officials met with a Ukrainian delegation in Florida to thrash out a timetable for presidential elections, the possibility of land swaps between Russia and Ukraine and other issues that remain unresolved on November 30.

The delegation was led by Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustam Umerov, who replaced head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, who was caught up in the expanding Energoatom corruption scandal and forced to resign on November 28. The US side was led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Few details have emerged from the meeting, but this was the last chance for Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) to present its red lines before US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who was at the meeting, flies to Moscow to present the US-sponsored plan to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Pointedly, no Europeans were invited to the meeting. However, Rubio organised a summit in Geneva last week where most EU leaders attempted and produced a cut-down pro-Ukraine 19-point peace plan (19PPP) that was much more favourable to Kyiv and Brussels. Kyiv fears that US President Donald Trump will dictate his terms to Kyiv and sell his deal over their heads to Russia to bring the war to an end before the end of this year.

Rubio told reporters as the meeting began that the talks were aimed at “securing an end to the war that leaves Ukraine sovereign and independent and with an opportunity for real prosperity.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a post on social media: “The American side is demonstrating a constructive approach, and in the coming days it is feasible to flesh out the steps to determine how to bring the war to a dignified end. The Ukrainian delegation has the necessary directives, and I expect the guys to work in accordance with clear Ukrainian priorities.”

Calls for end to the war grow louder

Putin is insisting that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) quit Donbas, but some commentators argue that his condition alone makes a deal impossible as Zelenskiy does not have enough political capital to agree to that and survive. Indeed, according to reports, soldiers that have been defending the frontline there since an insurrection broke out in 2014 after the Maidan Revolution would simply refuse to quit their posts.

“Zelenskiy doesn’t have the political capital to hand over the rest of Donetsk. The soldiers who have held these positions, many since 2014, would very likely not even withdraw when ordered,” Tom Mutch, a journalist covering Ukraine, said in a social media post.

The most prominent was an opinion piece in the UK’s Telegraph by Ukraine’s former commander in chief and now ambassador to the UK General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who lashed out at the Zelenskiy administration in what appears to be the start of a bid to take over as president.

The well-liked Zaluzhnyi was sacked by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last year following the failure of the 2023 summer offensive which he described as bringing the war to a stalemate. However, it is widely believed that Zelenskiy removed Zaluzhnyi after he overtook the president in the polls.

The negotiations are rapidly headed towards a crunch point, as EU leaders are due to meet on December 18-19 to discuss the so-called Reparations Loans that will tap Russia’s frozen reserves to pay for a continuation of the war.

Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever has adamantly blocked the decision as Brussels is home to some €140mn of that money and would be on the hook to repay it immediately should European courts rule the money must be returned to Russia – not an unlikely outcome. Wever has called on all the EU member states to share the risk with Brussels if they want the loan to go through – something the other states have refused to do, leaving Belgium to carry the entire exposure alone.

Last week, Wever upped his game and added that confiscating the money could also scupper the US plan to use part of the money to fund a $100bn US-Ukraine reconstruction fund – actual reparations that Russia has signalled it will accept and would make the use of Russian money to pay for reconstruction legal.

If the vote on the Reparation Loans fails then Zelenskiy is faced with a stark choice: capitulate or attempt to fight on without material support from the US and insufficient financial support from Europe. In this scenario some commentators suggest that Zelenskiy will resign by New Year and hand over the peace talks to the Parliamentary Speaker of the Rada. More speculation in Kyiv is that the Orange Revolutionary firebrand Yulia Tymoshenko will be offered this job, who has extensive experience of negotiating with the Kremlin from her time as Prime Minister, when she signed both a controversial gas deal and the renewal of the Stavropol port rent agreement.

No-Nato, no

Even if the EU finds the money to continue funding Ukraine’s war, there are other major sticking points in the 28-point peace plan (28PPP) deal, including Ukraine’s Nato ambitions. Those were part of the original US peace plan, but reportedly Trump cut his list to 22-points, removing the Nato references as too controversial.

A central part of the European version (24PPP) has been Ukraine will be offered some “real security deal guarantees.” In one version, the European Parliament non-binding resolution (EPR) on November 27, this was explicitly named as keeping the door to Nato membership open.

That is a red line for the Kremlin. When the diplomacy escalated into the eight-point list of demands issued by Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 2021 in the build up to the war, the Kremlin made it clear that the demands started with and ended with a legally binding ironclad guarantee that Ukraine would be forever excluded from Nato. Those demands were repeated in the first version of 28PPP.

The two rounds of diplomacy in January 2021 with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and in February 2021 with Macron failed as the West refused to contemplate any exclusion from Nato for Ukraine.

However, since then despite Zelenskiy repeated efforts to persuade the military alliance to offer Ukraine at least a timeline for membership, Nato has flatly refused to even contemplate the idea. Zelenskiy embarrassed everyone during a Nato summit in Vilnius in 2023 by demanding a clear expression of intent. Nato membership was also central to Zelenskiy’s victory plan presented to its Western allies in September 2024. Each time, Bankova was met by silence.

Senator Lindsey Graham repeated this position again in response to Zaluzhnyi’s op-ed, suggesting Ukraine prepare for a long-war. In this scenario the General said that Ukraine needs robust security guarantees from its partners – a call that Graham rejected as “not possible.”

“The suggested security guarantees to be given to Ukraine in this opinion piece are far beyond what is possible. It is imperative at this critical time that any analysis should meet the test of what is reasonably possible. The security guarantees mentioned, including accession into NATO and placing nuclear weapons in Ukraine, will not fly in my view,” Graham said in a social media post the next day.

Security deals are central to the hopes of bringing the war to an end and Ukraine’s allies seem to have changed their attitude to them. The 2022 Istanbul peace deal failed as the Ukrainian and Russian delegations agreed that Ukraine would give up its Nato ambitions but instead sign bilateral security deals Western allies. However, the deal collapsed a few days later after former Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv and told Zelenskiy that the West would not provide any security deals and to fight on. Zelenskiy pulled out of the deal after that.

Earlier this year at Europe’s Washington summit with Trump, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke about Nato “Article 5-like” collective security guarantees in air quotes, but that decision was not adopted by the other EU members. Anything less will be little more than the security assurances that Ukraine has been offered so far.

Next steps

The US was hoping to get an agreement with Kyiv to give up the Donbas at the Florida summit on November 30 before selling its version of the plan to Russian President Vladimir Putin this week.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Representative Witkoff, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushnir are participating in the negotiations on the US side and will meet with Putin in Moscow on December 2.

Ukraine and its allies are afraid that the US will agree a deal with the Kremlin over Ukraine’s head and present it to a weakened Zelenskiy as a “take or leave” it deal.

Trump has threatened to cut Ukraine off completely, not even selling its arms paid for by Europe, and at the end of last week, classified all new versions of its peace plan, excluding Europe and Ukraine for further discussions.

The Kremlin has also made it clear that it is keen to sign the US version of the plan with both the key negotiators, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy advisor, saying it was “almost acceptable,” but that the European versions were “unacceptable.”

Lavrov made those objections explicit in an interview on November 30.

"Europe has been acting so outrageously, demanding some sort of role in the talks. Can they even demand anything? We proceed from the premise that Europe has already removed itself from the talks,” Lavrov said, listing the failed attempts to bring the war to an end. “The most recent case occurred in April 2022 when, at the demand of then UK prime minister Boris Johnson and with Europe’s full acquiescence, if not connivance, the Istanbul agreements were derailed. Europe has used up its chances."

Putin has dug his heels in and is no mood to compromise as he believes he is winning on the battlefield and has no need to compromise.

“When Ukrainian troops leave the territories they hold, then the fighting will stop,” Putin at a press conference over the weekend. “If they don’t, then we’ll achieve that through military means.”