US President Donald Trump will meet Volodymyr Zelensky at Davos on Thursday, after his envoy Steve Witkoff expressed optimism about finalising a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
“I think we’ve got it down to one issue and we have discussed iterations of that issue, and that means it’s solvable,” Witkoff said ahead of his trip to Moscow for talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Witkoff did not specify the single issue but recent talks have focused on the future status of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in Donbas, with a proposal for a demilitarised and free economic zone in exchange for security guarantees for Kyiv.
“If both sides want to solve this we’re going to get it solved,” Witkoff said.
Ahead of Witkoff’s visit to Moscow with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the US president said on Wednesday that he thought both Putin and Zelensky were at a point where they could come together and get a deal done: “If they don’t, they’re stupid.”
Last week, Trump said he thought Putin was “ready to make a deal” but that Zelensky was “less ready”.
The Ukrainian president travelled through the night to get to Davos on Thursday.
He had initially called off his trip to deal with the aftermath of Russian strikes on Kyiv’s power infrastructure which have left large areas of the capital without heating, water or power during the harshest winter so far in almost four years of Russia’s full-scale war. Thousands of apartment blocks remain without heating.
There has been concern in Kyiv that Trump’s spat with his European Nato allies over the future of Greenland has deflected him from the war in Ukraine.
Zelensky said after talks with Trump in Miami late last month that a 20-point US plan to end the war was 90% ready and that Ukraine’s position on Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, was different to Russia’s.