As Donald Trump gets ready to meet with Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sent him a warning.
The meeting in Alaska on Friday, August 15, will be the first between a sitting U.S. president and the Russian leader since Joe Biden met with Putin in Geneva in 2021, nine months before Russia invaded Ukraine, according to the BBC.
Trump said on Truth Social that the meeting between me, as President of the United States, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia was highly anticipated.
Trump has hinted at the prospect of a meeting with Zelenskyy, but it’s still not clear if that will happen.
Right now, it’s a Trump-Putin summit, which Putin asked for, and the Kremlin has not talked directly with Kyiv since the war started.
One of Trump’s more controversial ideas is that a peace deal might require certain land swaps to secure an agreement. Kyiv has completely rejected this proposal.
According to CBS News, the White House has been seeking to get European leaders to support a plan that would let Russia keep Crimea, which it took over in 2014, and fully control the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
According to the same proposal, Russia would also give up its claims to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, even though Russian troops still hold some of them.
Zelenskyy completely rejected the idea on Telegram: The constitution of Ukraine already has the answer to the subject of Ukraine’s borders. No one will or can change it. The occupier will not get the land from Ukrainians.
Any solutions that don’t include Ukraine are also proposals that go against peace. They won’t bring anything. These are not solutions that will work.
He also said that Moscow was aiming to make these trades look like mutual exchanges when they would really just make Russia stronger so it could “resume the war.”
The leaders of the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Finland, and the European Commission all said in a rare united statement that borders should not be changed by force. They also promised to keep helping Ukraine diplomatically, militarily, and financially, according to BBC News.
The statement said that Ukraine has the right to choose its own future and that any agreement must guarantee both Ukraine’s sovereignty and Europe’s safety.
French President Emmanuel Macron went even farther and warned on X that Europeans will also have to be part of the solution since their own safety is at stake.
On Sunday, Zelenskyy publicly congratulated his supporters. “I am thankful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people today for the sake of peace in Ukraine, which is protecting the vital security interests of our European nations,” he added. “The end of the war must be fair.”