Zelenskyy Calls For Russia Deal While Putin Faces Challenges

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned Donald Trump that Ukraine may only have the upper hand in negotiations with Russia for a few more months.

The Ukrainian president predicted that Kyiv has just “this period of time before winter” to gain the diplomatic advantage over Moscow.

His warning comes as the American president’s enthusiasm for ending the four-year war has waned and US-brokered peace talks between the warring countries have broken down.

Much of the White House’s focus since February has been on the war it started in Iran, which Trump is now desperately trying to find a way out of.

But Zelenskyy told CBS News that there is still a window of opportunity, because Vladimir Putin has been on the back foot since December last year.

Russia is burning through troops at a shocking rate – the UK estimates Putin has lost nearly half a million soldiers since the war began – and has struggled to make many territorial gains this year.

As Zelenskyy noted:”(I)t began in December 2025, Russia began to lose initiative on the battlefield.

“And from this point of view, I shared this information with our American partners. I said to them in January, I think that we have window for the negotiations, because each month they will lose more and more people … So now we have this period of time before the winter.

“So I think that in winter — we have, before the winter, we need to find a way, diplomatic way, to sit and to speak.”

Zelenskyy also noted that there has “never” been an American negotiation group in Ukraine even though they’ve been several times to Moscow.

He pointed out that any success relies on the amount of international pressure on Russia.

Zelenskyy said: “But it depends [on] the pressure on Putin, the pressure in his society, and I think that is increasing, the pressure by sanctions – not to lift them, to put more. It’s good, it’s diplomatic way.

“I hope that the United States will do it, and European sanctions, but they made more than 20 packages of sanctions already.”

But Trump recently suspended some of America’s Russian oil sanctions due to high gas prices caused by the ongoing conflict in Iran.

In March, Zelenskyy also told Reuters the US ties its offer of security guanratees for a Ukraine peace deal to the idea of Ukraine giving up its entire eastern Donbas region to Russia.

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