Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the US has offered to create a “free economic zone” in the contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in a bid to push a peace deal over the line.

The Donbas – an industrial and coal-mining area primarily made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – has become one of the key sticking points in the US-proposed peace plan.

The first draft of the plan, widely leaked last month, stipulated that Ukraine must withdraw from areas of the Donbas it currently controls, thought to be a minority portion, as a condition for peace.

Ukraine considered that point “unacceptable”, and Mr Zelenskyy has spent the last few weeks drafting a response to the plan that removed “obvious anti-Ukraine points”.

After a series of meetings with Ukraine’s European allies, including a trip to London to meet Sir Keir Starmer on Monday, Zelenskyy said on Thursday that he’d sent Washington a revised peace plan, whittled down to just 20 points.

The new US proposal envisions Ukraine withdrawing from its territory in the Donbas without the Russians advancing, creating a neutral zone.

But Zelenskyy poured cold water on the plans as he briefed journalists in Kyiv.

“Who will govern this territory, which they are calling a ‘free economic zone’ or a ‘demilitarised zone’ – they don’t know,” he said.

“If one side’s troops have to retreat and the other side stays where they are, then what will hold back these other troops, the Russians? Or what will stop them disguising themselves as civilians and taking over this free economic zone? This is all very serious.

“It’s not a fact that Ukraine would agree to it, but if you are talking about a compromise then it has to be a fair compromise.”

Sky News military analyst Michael Clarke gave an ominous assessment of the proposal, saying it left “no physical solution” to resolve the problem of future attacks.

He said: “If Ukraine gives up the fortress cities in the Donbas, the only security they can have is by being heavily armed and being backed by their allies in some way.”

“The only thing that would stop Russia is deterrence: the knowledge that either the European forces were sitting in Ukraine ready to fight for them, which is hard to imagine at the moment, and even harder to imagine that they are backed up by American forces.”

Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Service Institute, was similarly sceptical.

“The general view is that the Russians will be too tempted to… try and come back for more,” he told Sky News.

He added that “some kind of temporary ceasefire” might work, but it would require “the Europeans to demonstrate they can put their forces where their mouth is in terms of a reassurance force”.

Amid this backdrop there was a meeting today of the coalition of the willing – the 34-strong bloc of nations pledged to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, of which Britain is a part.

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There was agreement to continue to fund military support, “progress on mobilising frozen Russian sovereign assets”, and an update from Zelenskyy on Russia’s continued bombardment of his country, according to Downing Street.

Afterwards, Zelenskyy said the bloc was working to ensure any peace deal contains “serious components of European deterrence”.

He added: “It is important that the United States is with us and supports these efforts. No one is interested in a third Russian invasion.”

He also addressed growing pressure from the US for an election in Ukraine, saying “there must be a ceasefire” before the country can go to the polls.

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Zelenskyy’s term expired last year, but wartime elections are forbidden by law in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the tone tonight from the White House was one of impatience, with Trump’s team saying he wouldn’t attend further meetings until there’s a real chance of signing a peace deal.

“The president is extremely frustrated with both sides of this war, and he is sick of meetings just for the sake of meeting,” said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

An oil tanker seized by the US off the Venezuelan coast on Wednesday spent years trying to sail the seas unnoticed.

Changing names, switching flags, and vanishing from tracking systems.

That all came to an end this week, when American coast guard teams descending from helicopters with guns drawn stormed the ship, named Skipper.

A US official said the helicopters that took the teams to the tanker came from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford.

The sanctioned tanker

Over the past two years, Skipper has been tracked to countries under US sanctions including Iran.

TankerTrackers.com, which monitors crude oil shipments, estimates Skipper has transported nearly 13 million barrels of Iranian and Venezuelan oil since 2021.

And in 2022, the US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) placed Skipper, then known as Adisa, on its sanctions list.

But that did not stop the ship’s activities.

In mid-November 2025, it was pictured at the Jose Oil Export Terminal in Venezuela, where it was loaded with more than one million barrels of crude oil.

It left Jose Oil Export Terminal between 4 and 5 December, according to TankerTrackers.com.

And on 6 or 7 December, Skipper did a ship-to-ship transfer with another tanker in the Caribbean, the Neptune 6.

Ship-to-ship transfers allow sanctioned vessels to obscure where oil shipments have come from.

The transfer with Neptune 6 took place while Skipper’s tracking system, known as AIS, was turned off.

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Dimitris Ampatzidis, senior risk and compliance manager at Kpler, told Sky News: “Vessels, when they are trying to hide the origin of the cargo or a port call or any operation that they are taking, they can just switch off the AIS.”

Matt Smith, head analyst US at Kpler, said they believe the ship’s destination was Cuba.

Around five days after leaving the Venezuelan port, it was seized around 70 miles off the coast.

Moving in the shadows

Skipper has tried to go unnoticed by using a method called ‘spoofing’.

This is where a ship transmits a false location to hide its real movements.

“When we’re talking about spoofing, we’re talking about when the vessel manipulates the AIS data in order to present that she’s in a specific region,” Mr Ampatzidis explained.

“So you declare false AIS data and everyone else in the region, they are not aware about your real location, they are only aware of the false location that you are transmitted.”

When it was intercepted by the US, it was sharing a different location more than 400 miles away from its actual position.

Skipper was manipulating its tracking signals to falsely place itself in Guyanese waters and fraudulently flying the flag of Guyana.

“We have really real concerns about the spoofing events,” Mr Ampatzidis told Sky News.

“It’s about the safety on the seas. As a shipping industry, we have inserted the AIS data, the AIS technology, this GPS tracking technology, more than a decade back, in order to ensure that vessels and crew on board on these vessels are safe when they’re travelling.”

Dozens of sanctioned tankers ‘operating off Venezuela’

Skipper is not the only sanctioned ship off the coast of Venezuela.

According to analysis by Windward, 30 sanctioned tankers were operating in Venezuelan ports and waters as of 11 December.

The tanker seizure is a highly unusual move from the US government and is part of the Trump administration’s increasing pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

In recent months, the largest US military presence in the region in decades has built up, and a series of deadly strikes has been launched on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

In the past, Mr Ampatzidis explained, actions like sanctions have had a limited effect on illegally operating tankers.

But the seizure of Skipper will send a signal to other dark fleet ships.

“From today, they will know that if they are doing spoofing, if they are doing dark activities in closer regions of the US, they will be in the spotlight and they will be the key targets from the US Navy.”

The Data X Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Donald Trump wants you to know that there is one leading reason why he is bearing down militarily on Venezuela: drugs.

It is, he has said repeatedly, that country’s part in the production and smuggling of illegal narcotics into America that lies behind the ratcheting up of forces in the Caribbean in recent weeks. But what if there’s something else going on here too? What if this is really all about oil?

In one respect this is clearly preposterous. After all, the United States is, by a country mile, the world’s biggest oil producer. Venezuela is a comparative minnow these days, the 21st biggest producer in the world, its output having been depressed under the Chavez and then Maduro regimes. Why should America care about Venezuelan oil?

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For the answer, one needs to spend a moment – strange as this will sound – contemplating the chemistry of oil. Crude oil is, as the name suggests, quite crude. It’s an organic compound, the product of ancient organisms that have been compressed and heated up under the earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. And as such, crude oil is subtly different depending on the conditions under which those organisms were compressed.

In some parts of the world, crude oil comes out of the ground as clear, flowing liquid. Sometimes it is green. Sometimes it is heavy, thick gloopy stuff. Oil producers have a word for these differing varieties: light, medium and heavy.

And here’s the first thing you need to know. Most of America’s refineries are set up to process the heavy stuff. In other words, if America is going to keep its cars fed with gasoline, it needs heavy, gloopy crude. And since it costs many, many billions of dollars to overhaul refineries, no-one particularly wants to do that anytime soon.

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But the second thing you need to know is the vast majority of that oil produced in America, thanks to the shale revolution, is light crude. In other words, America’s refineries are not compatible with most of the oil America produces.

The upshot is that for all that America theoretically pumps more crude oil than it would ever need out of its own territories, it is still totally dependent on trade to meet its demands for heavy oil. Most American crude is exported overseas. And America imports well over 6,000 barrels of oil a day to feed its refineries in Texas and Louisiana with the heavy stuff they can digest.

All of which brings us to Venezuela, because it is, alongside Canada and Russia, sitting on the world’s biggest reserves of heavy oil. Right now, most American oil comes from Canada but were Donald Trump keen to wean himself off Canadian crude, he is well aware there is a vast resource of it sitting on the other side of the Caribbean for all those Texas and Louisiana refineries.