Witkoff to meet Zelenskyy, European leaders on weekend, WSJ says

Andrea Palasciano, Michael Nienaber and Alberto Nardelli, Bloomberg News on Dec 12, 2025

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U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is headed to Europe to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders this weekend in Berlin, according to The Wall Street Journal, as part of President Donald Trump’s push for a peace deal.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other European leaders, including U.K Prime Minister Keir Starmer, had already been planning to .meet on Monday, according to Merz’s chief spokesman, Stefan Kornelius.

Ukrainian territory is at the center of running discussions between Washington, Kyiv and Moscow as negotiators work on a 20-point draft agreement. Russia has insisted that Ukraine withdraw its forces from eastern territories in the Donbas region, which include areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that the Russian military has failed to capture.

Zelenskyy said earlier this week that the U.S. has discussed turning the area into a “free economic zone” or a “demilitarized zone” under special administration. The president’s office declined to comment.

Questions remain over whether the regions would be recognized de facto as Russian along with the occupied Crimea peninsula. Other sticking points include ensuring that Ukraine receives robust security guarantees to ensure that Moscow doesn’t re-invade and the fate of $200 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown no signs of shifting his war goals — and it’s unclear whether Moscow would agree to a peace deal even if the U.S. and Ukraine were to reach an agreement.

(Alex Wickham, Daryna Krasnolutska and Kevin Whitelaw contributed to this report.)