Ahead of his Sunday meeting with President Donald Trump in Florida, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is training his focus on the security guarantees his country can extract from American interlocutors as both Kyiv and the White House look to end Russia’s nearly four-year-long war in Ukraine.
Overnight, Russia lobbed about 40 missiles — and nearly 500 drones — at Kyiv in a barrage that left major swaths of the capital city without power and killed at least one civilian. It’s a show, Zelenskyy said, of why Ukraine needs ironclad security guarantees from international partners to feel comfortable putting down its weapons.
And Trump, he said, is the decider-in-chief.
“It is very important for us that there is a signal that we want legally binding security guarantees,” Zelenskyy told reporters. “And this depends primarily on President Trump. The question is what security guarantees President Trump is ready to give to Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian president’s visit to Florida comes at a pivotal time, with Trump in recent weeks showing increasing frustration that his efforts at peace have so far come in vain. Zelenskyy will bring to Florida a 20-point peace plan, which includes a demilitarized zone. He and Trump are expected to discuss the future of both the pivotal Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and Ukraine’s Donbas region.
En route to Florida, Zelenskyy made a pitstop on Saturday to meet Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. “We have the conditions — the possibility — of a just and lasting peace,” Carney said as he welcomed the Ukrainian leader to Halifax, Nova Scotia. “But that requires a willing Russia.”
Both leaders noted the latest assault on Ukraine’s capital. “The barbarism that we saw overnight — the attack on Kyiv — shows just how important it is that we stand with Ukraine during this difficult time,” Carney said.
“This really shows that Putin doesn’t want peace,” Zelenskyy added.
The leaders did not take questions before heading into a bilateral meeting ahead of a virtual call with the coalition of the willing.
“Tomorrow, I will have, I hope, a very important and very constructive meeting with the president,” Zelenskyy said.
But Trump sounded skeptical in an exclusive Friday call with POLITICO.
“He doesn’t have anything until I approve it,” he said. “So we’ll see what he’s got.”
Zelenskyy also pushed back on Trump’s call for new elections in Ukraine, which the U.S. president promoted in an exclusive interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns at the beginning of the month. A referendum “certainly cannot be done in the conditions in which we live today,” Zelenskyy told reporters before arriving in Canada, owing to the likelihood of Russian interference.
Earlier in December, Zelenskyy claimed he was willing to overturn a Ukrainian law that banned elections during martial law, provided that the U.S. and Europe could attest to the security of any vote.
“I have always said: I am not clinging to the chair; we are ready for this,” Zelenskyy said on Saturday. “I am politically ready, but we must be legally prepared so that the elections can later be recognized as legitimate. The second issue is security.”
Sue Allan contributed to this report.
