On August 18, 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met with U.S. President Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, in Washington, DC.
Presidential Palace of Ukraine | Anadolu | Getty Images
US President Donald Trump’s outgoing special envoy to Ukraine said a deal to end the war in Ukraine was “very close” and that the future depended on resolving two major outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the Donbass region, which includes Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
The Ukraine war was the deadliest European conflict since World War II and sparked the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
Keith Kellogg, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine who is retiring in January, said at the Reagan Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict are in the “last 10 meters” and that is always the most difficult.
Kellogg said the main unresolved issues are territorial, primarily regarding the future of the Donbas people, and another regarding the future of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest and under Russian control.
“Once those two issues are resolved, I think the rest will fall into place pretty well,” Kellogg said Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. “We’re almost there.”
“We’re really, really close,” Kellogg said.
Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq, said the scale of casualties from the Ukraine war was “horrific” and unprecedented for a regional war.
Kellogg said Russia and Ukraine have collectively suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded, since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has disclosed reliable estimates of losses.
The Russian government said it estimated that Western countries and the Ukrainian government had inflated losses. Kiev said the Russian government was inflating the amount of damage to Ukraine.
Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhia, and parts of the Kharkov, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Last month, a leaked set of 28 draft US peace proposals, new tab, was revealed, alarming Ukrainian and European officials for bowing to key Russian demands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia’s control of one-fifth of Ukraine and limits on Ukraine’s military.
According to the Russian government, these proposals currently include 27 items, divided into four different elements. The exact content is not in the public domain.
Under the initial US proposal, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, whose reactors are currently in cold shutdown, would be restarted under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the electricity produced would be divided equally between Russia and Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Saturday that he had a lengthy and “substantive” phone conversation with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkov and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The Kremlin said on Friday that Kushner would carry out the main task of drafting the deal.
