The United States is pushing for a demilitarised “free economic zone” between Russian and Ukrainian troops in the east of the country as part of a settlement to end the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday.
“They see Ukrainian forces leaving the territory of Donetsk region, and the supposed compromise is that Russian forces do not enter this territory … which they already call a ‘free economic zone’,” Zelensky told reporters, including AFP, at a briefing in Kyiv.
Russia would not be required to withdraw in the Donetsk region, or from its positions in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, but would pull troops out of the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions, Zelensky added.
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