Next round of talks in Miami

Zelenskyy said Ukraine has accepted Washington’s proposal to host the next round of talks in the US next week, likely to be held in Miami. This would mark the first trilateral discussion in the US.

The second round of US-brokered trilateral talks concluded in Abu Dhabi, with both sides agreeing on a major prisoner exchange. However, the discussions produced no breakthrough, leaving key political and security issues unresolved.

Deadlock over Donbas — an industrial heartland

Russia is pressing Kyiv to withdraw from the eastern Ukrainian territory of Donbas, where fighting remains intense — a condition Kyiv says it will never accept. The Donbas refers collectively to Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts — once considered the country’s industrial heartland.

The region accounts for over 50 per cent of the country’s coal reserves, 20 per cent of its gas fields, hosts fertile farmland, water resources and vast critical mineral deposits, essential to renewable energy technologies, according to the Centre for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), a think-tank that partners with the World Economic Forum (WEF).

According to Moscow’s “Novorossiya” narrative, large swathes of southeastern Ukraine are considered historically Russian lands, thereby justifying its occupation.

Russia currently controls nearly all of Luhansk and around 70% of the Donetsk oblast, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank.

Earlier, The New York Times reported a growing number of Ukrainians who say they would hand over the part of the Donbas still controlled by Kyiv to Russia if that would end the war.

In October 2025, two months after hosting Russian President Vladimir Putin for a summit in Alaska, US President Donald Trump said that Ukraine’s Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving much of it under Moscow’s control, as a way to end the war.