Ukraine's president told Fox & Friends on Wednesday that his country is ready to stop the fighting exactly where the armies now stand — the front-line freeze he argued against for four years — and then go to Washington and Europe for the security guarantees that would keep Russia from coming back.
Asked by host Brian Kilmeade whether he would accept a peace deal that freezes everything the way it is right now, leaving Ukraine in control of 75% or more of its country regardless of how the war started, Volodymyr Zelensky did not hesitate: "Yes." He called the freeze a ceasefire — "or 'stop killing,' like President Trump called it" — and said it is the least Moscow must agree to before anything else can move.
"Right now, we have to freeze, and I think this is a real way to end this war."
The next step, Zelensky said, is guarantees from the United States and Europe "so that we are not afraid that the occupation will return, the aggression will return, the killing will return." He was just as firm on what a freeze does not mean: Ukraine will not hand over the Donbas or recognise the occupied territories as Russian, because, as he put it, Russia is not winning on the battlefield and is using pressure to push Ukrainians off land it could not take. He also pointed to the 9.5 million Ukrainians who have lost their homes and are scattered abroad — they have to be able to come home and rebuild the country.
The turn is a sharp one. In 2022 Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal that freezing the conflict "means a pause that gives Russia a break to rest," and in February 2025 he told ITV News he would not want a frozen line because people kept dying along the old Donbas line for years. What has changed is the diplomacy around him: he spent Tuesday in Oslo in talks with Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff that both sides called productive, and Witkoff has now carried the ideas on to Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg.
None of that guarantees Moscow says yes. Russia has rejected ceasefire after ceasefire, arguing a pause only lets Kyiv rearm, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week there will be "no ceasefire to bring him back to his senses and pump him full of weapons." Putin did agree on Wednesday, in principle, to resume three-way talks with the United States and Ukraine after November 10, according to his adviser Yuri Ushakov — but a freeze takes a Russian signature that has not come, and the guarantees that would make it hold do not yet exist. Zelensky, whose country is still being struck, he said on Wednesday, "virtually every hour," closed the interview where he started: "Of course, we are not losing this war. But we are losing people. That's why we need to end this war as quickly as possible."