Zelensky opens the door to a meeting with Trump as Ukraine seeks peace agreements with Russia

María Senovilla, a journalist collaborating with Atalayar, analyses Ukraine's latest moves on the battlefront and in international diplomacy. From recent military victories to the humanitarian challenges of winter, Senovilla explains how the decisions of Zelensky, Trump and Putin will shape the course of the war and the lives of millions of affected civilians.

Ukraine has presented an agreement, the most advantageous to date, which it has offered to Russia, and Putin has already rejected it.

This new proposal, which states that Zelensky would be willing to withdraw his troops from Donbas, provided that Russia also withdraws its soldiers and thus turns this disputed territory into a demilitarised zone, has apparently already been rejected by the Kremlin without even reaching the negotiating table.

This formula is similar to the one suggested by the United States to turn the area into a free economic zone, and it is hoped that President Trump's negotiating team will defend it at the negotiating table before Putin's envoys in the upcoming meetings and that this may change their minds. While waiting for the US team to make progress, the Kremlin has already shown reluctance to accept Zelensky's new plan, which includes a total of 20 points and where Ukraine's main concern remains guarantees that Russia will respect what has been agreed at the negotiating table and will not launch a new offensive, an attempt to re-invade the country once the peace agreement is reached. It will be difficult because, according to the Financial Times, Putin is receiving reports from the battlefield, reports from his own generals who assure him that Russia's military victory is imminent, giving him a sugar-coated version of what is happening on the battlefield.

No one dares to tell the Russian leader about the huge number of human and material losses Russia is suffering, or about the slow progress being made in Donbas, which at the moment seems more like a war of attrition than the imminent victory that Putin's generals are describing to him. Now we must wait for the possible meeting between Zelensky and Trump, where new ideas on how to achieve peace in Ukraine could be discussed, as President Zelensky has stated, acknowledging that all Ukrainians, including himself, want Putin to die, but that when they pray to God, they ask for something more important than Putin's death: they ask for peace for Ukraine. Yes, we paid close attention to that statement, which is a very colloquial phrase among Ukrainians, but when used in that context and that speech, the message was clear: they were either very good or not so good wishes for Mr Putin.

Last week, the Ukrainian army at least recaptured Kupiansk. It was a great Christmas victory for Ukraine.

Zelensky's army thus concluded a very rapid, very well-organised and undoubtedly successful campaign to expel Russian troops from this enclave located in the province of Kharkiv.

This city, Kupiansk, was already occupied in 2022. At that time, the battle to liberate the city, which took place in October at the beginning of the great Ukrainian counter-offensive, made the front pages of the international press.

The Russian troops remained, while the Ukrainian troops advanced to the bridge linking the two banks of the Oskil River and dividing the city in two, with the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other, leading to some very intense urban combat that was reported almost live. Since then, the city has been under constant siege by Russian troops, who were 15-12 kilometres from its lines. Every time I went to work in Kupiansk, I could hear the Russian artillery at work.

It was Russian artillery, which had been pounding the city's industrial area. The factories have been unable to operate since the beginning of the war because they have been completely bombed. Even so, many citizens who had not wanted to leave the city were struggling to resist amid the bombings.

Finally, Russia launched a powerful assault operation with two full battalions, which managed to enter the urban territory of the city. Zelensky's army reacted very quickly, in a well-coordinated operation. They finished clearing, as they say in military jargon, the houses where several groups of Russian soldiers who had not managed to leave had taken refuge.

It can now be declared that the city has been completely recaptured by the Ukrainian army. It has been a great victory and also a breath of fresh air for all the Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches along the entire front line, who have received a glimmer of hope with this news.

We are about to say goodbye to 2025, a difficult year for Ukraine.

We will take a brief look back, a brief summary, but for Ukraine it has been a difficult year and I am left with one consideration, a very accurate assessment. When politicians talk about ‘you withdraw from this territory, you give me this, the Donbas above, the Donbas below, you leave, you stay...’, we must bear in mind that we are talking about five million human beings, people who were historically used as pawns in other territories such as the Middle East, which then had absolutely disastrous consequences that we are still suffering today, but in the case of Ukraine, it has been a difficult year.

The issue of people trapped in the occupied territories, although little is said about it because, unfortunately, the press is not allowed to work in those occupied territories, we are all aware that they are bearing the brunt of this war.

It is estimated that 80% of the war crimes committed by Russia are taking place precisely in these occupied territories. We are talking about arrests, rapes, murders, torture, which we already saw when the Ukrainians managed to liberate part of Kharkiv in 2022. We saw the torture chambers they had set up, and at the time we published an extensive report in Atalayar magazine on how they operated. We must not forget that since then, these torture chambers have continued to operate in other places where journalists cannot see them to tell the rest of the world, but we are aware of what is happening.

When we talk about these negotiations, these agreements, the first thing that comes to mind is what will become of these people, of them and the six and a half million Ukrainians who are refugees living in other countries, and another 3-4 million who are displaced within Ukraine without having managed to rebuild their lives, because it is very difficult to leave your home with what you can fit in two plastic bags and start from scratch, which is what has happened to millions and millions of Ukrainians.

Zelensky said that it is ‘either we surrender or we face the harshest winter of our lives’, and that is what seems to be happening, especially given the situation with issues such as energy. By systematically bombing Ukraine's energy network, power stations, heating plants and distribution nodes, Russia has managed to reduce the country's capacity for electricity and heating.

In Kiev, for example, there has been no more than eight hours of electricity, at least it is organised normally, and the shops have heating, so you can live a reasonably normal life, but outside the big cities, such as Donbas, when they cut off the electricity, you don't know when it will come back on and when it will be converted into heating. Temperatures of -17°C are expected, and winter is just beginning, because until a few weeks ago it wasn't particularly cold.

What is coming will be very hard, both in the cities and in the areas near the front line, where it is already noticeable that Russia has managed to enlarge the “grey zone”, what we used to consider the front line, which was the line of contact and 15 km beyond, which was where the enemy army's artillery reached, Now it has been extended to 50-60 km, because Russia is attacking with guided aerial bombs, with Sajed drones, and also with other first-person view drones, which are used to hunt down citizens and vehicles on the roads. No matter how hard the Ukrainian Army tries to cover the entire Donbas with nets, they are not 100% effective, and this is what the Ukrainians will have to deal with, in what is likely to be the harshest winter of their lives.