Zelenskyy meets with Macron in Paris as U.S.-led peace negotiations advance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday at the Elysée presidential palace in Paris, part of a flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at brokering the terms for a potential ceasefire in the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s visit to Paris followed a meeting between Ukrainian and U.S. officials in Florida on Sunday, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as productive. The two sides have worked to make revisions to a proposed U.S.-authored plan that was developed in negotiations between Washington and Moscow but criticized as being too weighted toward Russian demands.

Those criticisms were perhaps most vehement from Ukraine’s European allies who, while welcoming U.S. peace efforts, pushed back on key tenets of the plan. Ahead of his meeting with Zelenskyy on Monday, Macron’s office said the two leaders would discuss conditions for a “fair and lasting peace.”

U.S. President Donald Trump