Efforts to end the fighting are on the rise, according to Kellogg, who will step down from his post in January.
We are really, really close, he says in connection with the RNDF defense conference in California.
The main nuts to crack are the future of Donbass – consisting of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine – and the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
"If we can get those two issues resolved, I think the rest will work out pretty well," Kellogg said, according to Reuters.
Russia occupies large parts of Donbass, but not all of it, and it is known that the Russians, in negotiations with the United States, have demanded that Ukraine give up the rest.
Ukraine has called out the unreasonableness of rewarding the aggressor with land. President Volodymyr Zelensky has also stated that it would be illegal to hand over land without a referendum and that control of Donbass would give Russia an excellent starting point for a possible new future invasion.
As for the Russian-controlled nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia, it is Europe's largest and central to Ukraine's energy supply.
