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The secretary, Daniel Driscoll, was in Geneva over the weekend for talks with a Ukrainian delegation.
Nov. 25, 2025Updated 9:19 a.m. ET
The U.S. Army secretary, Daniel P. Driscoll, met with a Russian delegation on Tuesday in the United Arab Emirates to discuss President Trump’s latest plan for peace in Ukraine, a U.S. official said.
The conversations, which took place in Abu Dhabi, the capital, are the latest turn in the Trump administration’s flurry of new meetings aimed at ending Russia’s four years of war in Ukraine.
The U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomacy, said that a Ukrainian delegation was also in Abu Dhabi and had been in contact with Mr. Driscoll and his team. Mr. Driscoll held talks with Ukrainian officials over the weekend in Geneva and emerged with a revised peace proposal.
The U.S. official said on Tuesday that the Ukrainian side was on board with Mr. Trump’s latest plan. “There are some minor details to be sorted out, but they have agreed to a peace deal,” he said.
Oleksandr Bevz, a member of Ukraine’s negotiating team, told The New York Times on Tuesday that negotiations were continuing. Mr. Trump had said that he expected an answer from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on the proposal by Thursday but also that the deadline could be extended.
There was no sign that Russia was on board with the latest U.S. proposal. Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said on Tuesday that Russia was waiting for the United States to submit the “interim” version of the peace plan that had been agreed upon by Ukraine and its European allies.
“Then we will see,” Mr. Lavrov said after a meeting in Moscow with his Belarusian counterpart.
If the plan “erased” what Mr. Lavrov called “the spirit and letter of Anchorage” — a reference to an August meeting in Alaska where Mr. Trump sided with Russia’s approach to end the conflict — then “it will be a fundamentally different situation,” he said, suggesting that Russia would resist any rolling back of the maximalist positions that were in the initial plan.
Some Trump administration officials believe that revisions to the peace framework that emerged from meetings between U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators in Geneva could lead President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to dismiss it out of hand.
The administration had been pressuring Ukraine to accept a 28-point peace plan that called for Kyiv to make concessions that Mr. Zelensky and his allies had already largely rejected, including giving up land and limiting the size of its military. Ukraine’s European allies had criticized the 28-point proposal because it was initially negotiated between the United States and Russia, without Ukrainian involvement.
By Monday, the plan had shrunk to closer to 20 points, setting aside for future negotiations some of Ukraine’s “red lines,” including capping the size of its military, a proposed ban on NATO troops inside Ukraine, and the boundaries between the two sides.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
