US Envoy Kellogg Says Ukraine Peace Deal Is Really Close
US President Donald Trump’s outgoing Ukraine envoy said a deal to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and now depended on resolving two main outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The Ukraine war is the deadliest European conflict since World War Two and has triggered the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
US Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, who is due to step down in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict were in “the last 10 meters” which he said was always the hardest.
The two main outstanding issues, Kellogg said, were on territory – primarily the future of the Donbas – and the future of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which is under Russian control.
“If we get those two issues settled, I think the rest of the things will work out fairly well,” Kellogg said on Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re really, really close,” said Kellogg.
Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq, said the scale of the death and injuries caused by the Ukraine war was “horrific” and unprecedented in terms of a regional war.
He said that, together, Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose credible estimates of their losses.
Moscow says Western and Ukrainian estimates inflate its losses. Kyiv says Moscow inflates estimates of Ukrainian losses.
