KYIV
\nA meeting with US President Donald Trump will happen \u201cin the near future,\u201d Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday, signaling progress in talks to end the nearly four-year war between Russia and Ukraine.
\n\u201cWe are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level \u2013 with President Trump in the near future,\u201d Zelensky wrote on X.
\n\u201cA lot can be decided before the New Year,\u201d he added.
\nZelensky\u2019s announcement came after he said Thursday he had a \u201cgood conversation\u201d with US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
\nTrump has unleashed an extensive diplomatic push to end the war, but his efforts have run into sharply conflicting demands by Moscow and Kyiv.
\nZelensky said Tuesday he would be willing to withdraw troops from the country\u2019s eastern industrial heartland as part of a plan to end the war, if Moscow also pulls back and the area becomes a demilitarized zone monitored by international forces.
\nThough Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday that there had been \u201cslow but steady progress\u201d in the peace talks, Russia has given no indication that it will agree to any kind of withdrawal from land it has seized.
\nIn fact, Moscow has insisted that Ukraine relinquish the remaining territory it still holds in the Donbas \u2014 an ultimatum that Ukraine has rejected. Russia has captured most of Luhansk and about 70 percent of Donetsk \u2014 the two areas that make up the Donbas.
\nOn the ground, Russian drone attacks on the city of Mykolaiv and its suburbs overnight into Friday left part of the city without power.
\nMeanwhile, Ukraine said it struck a major Russian oil refinery Thursday using British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles.
\nUkraine\u2019s General Staff said its forces hit the Novoshakhtinsk refinery in Russia\u2019s Rostov region. \u201cMultiple explosions were recorded. The target was hit,\u201d it wrote on Telegram.
\nRostov regional Gov. Yuri Slyusar said a firefighter was wounded when extinguishing the fire.
\nUkraine\u2019s long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries aim to deprive Moscow of the oil export revenue it needs to pursue its full-scale invasion. Russia wants to cripple the Ukrainian power grid, seeking to deny civilians access to heat, light and running water in what Kyiv officials say is an attempt to \u201cweaponize winter.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KYIV A meeting with US President Donald Trump will happen \u201cin the near future,\u201d Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday, signaling progress in talks to end the nearly four-year war between Russia and Ukraine. \u201cWe are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level \u2013 with President Trump […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477795,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-522333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n