US and Ukrainian negotiators meet in Florida to discuss ending the war

Senior Trump administration officials met with Ukrainian negotiators in South Florida on Sunday to continue peace talks as President Trump pushes to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“It’s about creating a pathway forward that leaves Ukraine sovereign, independent and prosperous, and so we expect to make even more progress today,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Hallandale Beach, Florida, where the meeting took place.

The Trump administration had initially offered a plan for peace that Ukraine and many of its allies balked at, saying that the plan was too favorable to Russia. After pushback, it looks like a new peace plan is being formed.

The talks shifted on Sunday with a change in leadership from the Ukrainian side. A new chief negotiator, national security council secretary Rustem Umerov, led the talks for Kyiv after the resignation on Friday of previous team leader Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, amid a corruption scandal at home.

As the meeting began, Umerov thanked the United States and its officials for their support. “US is hearing us, US is supporting us, US is walking beside us,” Umerov said in English.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were also present to represent the US side. Witkoff is expected to meet Russian counterparts later this week.

Zelensky had said he expects the results of previous meetings in Geneva would be “hammered out” on Sunday. In Geneva, Ukraine presented a counter-offer to proposals laid out by US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll to leaders in Kyiv some two weeks ago.

Ukraine’s leadership, facing a domestic political crisis fueled by a probe into major graft in the energy sector, is seeking to push back on Moscow-friendly terms as Russian forces grind forward along the front lines of the war.

Last week, Zelensky warned Ukrainians, who are weathering widespread blackouts from Russian air strikes on the energy system, that his country was at its most difficult moment yet but pledged not to make a bad deal.

“As a weatherman would say, there’s the inherent difficulty in forecasting because the atmosphere is a chaotic system where small changes can lead to large outcomes,” Kyiv’s first deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya, also part of the delegation, wrote on X from Miami on Sunday.

Depending on how things go in Florida, this could be a positive step toward a peaceful resolution to the war that doesn’t lead to Ukraine’s capitulation, or it could be another frustrating roadblock to peace.