Keith Kellogg, the US president's special representative for Ukraine, has said that an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is "really close" and depends on resolving only two fundamental issues. Still, the Kremlin is demanding "radical changes" to the US proposals, he said.
Kellogg, who is set to step down in January, told the Ronald Reagan National Defense Forum that the conflict resolution process is "in the last 10 meters," which he said is always the most challenging stage.
He said the remaining two main issues are territorial: the future of Donbass and the fate of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant (the largest in Europe, currently under Russian control).
"If we can resolve those two issues, the rest will fall into place quite easily," Kellogg said.
"We are very close, really very close," he stressed.
After nearly four hours of talks in the Kremlin last week, which included Vladimir Putin, former US President Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said that "territorial issues" had been discussed.
Kellogg also said that the losses and damage caused by the war were "brutal" and unprecedented for any regional conflict.
He said that Russia and Ukraine have together suffered more than 2 million casualties since the war began, although neither Moscow nor Kyiv has published reliable figures on their losses.
Currently, Russia controls 19.2 percent of Ukraine's territory, including Crimea (since 2014), the entire Luhansk region, more than 80 percent of Donetsk, about 75 percent of Kherson and Zaporizhia, as well as parts of Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk.
