Shooting down news reports of a major concession by Kyiv to the Kremlin, a top Ukrainian general present at recent peace talks in Geneva and Abu Dhabi said on Tuesday no limit has been set by anyone on the size of Ukraine’s military, nor would Kyiv accept one were it to leave Ukraine vulnerable to another Russian invasion.

The comments made by Lt. Gen. Andriy Hnatov to the national news platform Liga.net contradicted mainstream western media news articles that the Russo-Ukrainian War peace process had moved dramatically forward with the major Ukrainian concession, purportedly, that Ukraine had agreed to limit the size of its armed forces to 800,000 personnel.

Hnatov, 45, heads the Ukrainian military top leadership in its General Staff. He was a member of the Ukrainian delegation to Nov. 23 peace talks in Geneva Switzerland, to Nov. 24-25 talks in Abu Dhabi, with US delegations.

A Monday Financial Times article citing “Ukrainian negotiators” reported Ukraine’s national leadership had agreed to cap on its armed forces to 800,000 personnel in peacetime. The current Russian demand is that Ukraine cut the size of its army in half and promise never to purchase, develop or field advanced long-range strike weapons.

Hnatov in a nine-minute interview published by Liga.Net on Tuesday told the Ukrainian news platform that during the US-Ukraine talks – at which he was present as the senior Ukrainian military representative – the size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) was discussed in the context of what strength force might realistically deter Russia from attacking again once peace was established. The Ukrainian delegation neither saw proposals of nor agreed to any limit to the size or fighting capability of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), he said.

“It [the Geneva talks] was not about reducing the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It was about views on the size of the Armed Forces in peacetime. This is a very debatable topic,” Hnatov said.

A decorated career Marine officer with with 27 years of service and close to a decade of experience leading soldiers in combat, Hnatov is widely respected in Ukraine as a “new generation” commander with close ties to troops on the front line and readiness to employ new war technologies like drones. He took over the number two job in the Ukrainian military in March 2025.

Following those talks major US news outlets citing an unnamed US official reported the Ukrainian delegation had agreed to a peace deal and that there were only “some minor details to be sorted out.”

Hnatov’s remarks exposed an ever-wide gap between White House and Kremlin rhetoric that a Russo-Ukrainian War peace deal is close and that Ukraine is losing the war, and the Ukrainian-European view that the AFU is fighting effectively; and that White House claims are driven by Trump’s foreign policy largely supporting Russia at the expense of Ukraine.

Hours after Hnatov’s remarks became public, the US-headquartered Bloomberg news agency published transcripts of telephone conversations between Trump administration staff and Russian officials appearing to document close cooperation between the Team Trump and Moscow to impose punishing peace terms on Ukraine.

In an Oct. 14 conversation, per Bloomberg, White House chief Russia negotiator Steve Witkoff seemed to coordinate with senior Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump to speak by telephone to discuss a common negotiating strategy, prior to a peace talks between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

According the transcript of an Oct. 29 phone call between Ushakov and Putin personal envoy Kirill Dmitriev, the two top Kremlin officials discussed a plan for the US to put forward a list of Russian demands to Ukraine, as American demands, and seemed confident the White House had agreed with the subterfuge.

US officials led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Tuesday comment said the conversations never took place and that media invented “fake news” to harm the peace process. America wants peace and is not taking sides in the Russo-Ukraine War, the former Florida Senator said.

An investigative article published by NBC News buttressed the Ukrainian view the White House and the Kremlin are cooperating to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty, in a Nov. 25 report detailing a visit by US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll and US Army Chief of Staff Randy George (Hnatov’s counterpart) under the cover of a “military cooperation” visit to Kyiv on Nov. 19-20.

According to that NBC report, Driscoll and George instead of discussing possible US military assistance to Ukraine demanded Ukraine agree to the Russo-US peace terms immediately because:

“The situation for Ukraine would only get worse over time, and it was better to negotiate a peace settlement now rather than end up in an even weaker position in the future.”

One source told NBC the US Army leadership’s message to Ukraine was:

“You are losing... and you need to accept the deal.”

Hours before Driscoll and George presented the Russian demands to Kyiv, Russian missile and drone strikes killed 31 Ukrainian civilians and injure more than 70, most when at least one Russian cruise missile smashed into and partially collapsed a civilian apartment building in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopol.

US President Donald Trump during a Tuesday meeting with reporters aboard Air Force One argued Kyiv must make substantial concessions to Russia or be destroyed.

Trump said:

“Look. How this is developing – it’s going in one direction. So this is land that Russia will capture anyway within a couple of months. So if you want to fight and lose another 50-60 thousand people... Or do you want to do something now?”

Actual Russian battle performance bears out neither Trump’s prediction nor calculation.

As of November 2025, according independent analysts, the Russian Federation occupies about 19 percent of Ukraine’s total land space and claims about 9 percent of Ukraine’s population now live in Russia.

Since January 2023 Russian gains thanks largely to bloody frontal assaults have amounted to about 5,900 square kilometers of newly-captured land – or about 165-170 square kilometers Ukrainian territory taken over with its inhabitants each month.

At that pace the Russian military would need not “a couple of months” but about thirteen years to take over Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions and meet current Kremlin territorial claims on Ukraine.

At present casualty rates the conquest, according to independent analysts, would cost the Russian military between 650,000 and 800,000 men dead and wounded. It is not clear that Ukraine would sue for peace at that point.

Overnight Tuesday-Wednesday Ukrainian kamikaze drones flew through nearly 1,000 kilometers of Russian airspace to attack, set on fire and set off multiple explosions at a military electronics factory in the Ural region city of Cheboksary.

Russian authorities said all the drones were shot down but that people living near the factory would be evacuated as a precaution. Kremlin troop losses on the day were 980 men killed or seriously wounded, a Wednesday General Staff situation report said.