Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to travel to the US in the coming days for a key meeting with Donald Trump, as Washington continues to push for a possible peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow.

The Ukrainian president announced the visit on Friday in a social media post, saying he had received a briefing from Rustem Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, on new contacts with US officials.

“We are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level – with President Trump in the near future,” Zelenskyy said, adding that “a lot can be decided before the New Year”.

Washington has not publicly confirmed the meeting. A reporter for Axios, Barak Ravid, said on X that Trump and Zelenskyy were expected to meet on Sunday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The possible meeting follows a burst of diplomatic activity last weekend in Miami, where Trump’s peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, met separately with Russian and Ukrainian representatives, as well as Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

US officials described the discussions as “constructive”, though Moscow has played down expectations of progress, and there are few signs that Vladimir Putin is prepared to soften his maximalist demands to end the full-scale invasion.

At a closed-door meeting with Russia’s business elite on Wednesday evening, the Russian president reportedly reiterated his demand that Ukraine hand over the entire eastern Donbas region as part of any peace deal.

According to Kommersant, one of Russia’s best-connected newspapers, Putin also signalled openness to a limited territorial exchange with Ukraine, with Moscow potentially exchanging small areas of land Russian forces occupy in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv and southern Zaporizhzhia regions.

Zelenskyy has previously said Ukraine would be open to withdrawing “heavy forces” from parts of Donbas it still controls, but only if Russia mirrored the move as part of a US-backed initiative to create a “free economic zone” in the region.

On Friday, the Kremlin said Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, held a call with the US administration after Moscow received an updated US proposal on a potential peace deal, although there were no signs that a breakthrough had been reached.

Russia has repeatedly insisted it is prepared to continue fighting in Ukraine if no peace deal is reached, saying it is confident it can achieve its war aims through military means.

Yet while Moscow has made slow, grinding progress on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have in recent days pushed Russian troops out of the city of Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region.

It marked a rare Ukrainian counteroffensive, undermining Putin’s repeated claims that the city was under Moscow’s control.