Donald Trump now wants his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to cede more territory to Russia. He rejects the idea | Credit: Review News/Shutterstock
President Donald Trump wanted a ceasefire as an outcome of Friday’s (August 15) summit in Alaska. Vladimir Putin, it has now emerged, wants Ukraine to cede Donetsk and Luhansk as a condition to end the war, and Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky rejects the demand. However, Trump insisted on Saturday that Ukraine should make a deal to end the war with Russia because “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not”
Zelenskiy said he would meet Trump in Washington on Monday, while Kyiv’s European allies welcomed Trump’s efforts but vowed to back Ukraine and tighten sanctions on Russia.
A source close to the negotiations between Trump and Putin told AFP that Putin “de facto demands that Ukraine leave Donbas,” an area consisting of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. “Trump is inclined to support it,” the source said. However, “The Ukrainian president refused to leave Donbas,” the source said.
Ceding to Russian invaders’ demands
The New York Times also cited two senior European officials saying Trump supported Putin’s plan “to end the war in Ukraine by ceding unconquered territory to the Russian invaders, rather than try for a ceasefire.”
AFP’s source said US officials had said that if Russia‘s demands were met, then “Putin would not continue the offensive in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, so there would be a kind of freeze there. But de facto it all will depend on Putin’s word of honour,” the source said.
Drops own plans, bows to Putin’s demands
On Saturday morning, Trump also publicly dropped plans for an immediate ceasefire he had himself championed for months, instead embracing Putin’s preferred path to ending the war: pushing through a far-reaching agreement before halting any fighting.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often do not hold up,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, as reported earlier by viraltrendingcontent.
In the meantime, and likely in response to Putin’s demands and Trump’s bowing to them, European leaders who make up the ‘coalition of the willing’ are set to hold a conference call on Sunday, August 17, ahead of crunch talks between Trump and Zelensky on Monday, August 18.
EU wants Ukraine’s right to NATO
The coalition, co-chaired by Sir Keir Starmer, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, aims to protect a peace deal in Ukraine.
A statement from European leaders said, “Ukraine must have ironclad security guarantees”, and no limits should be placed on its armed forces or right to seek NATO membership as Russia has sought, according to Reuters.
But in his remarks after the meeting in Alaska, Putin gave little indication of softening his stance, repeating that Moscow wanted the “root causes” of the conflict addressed – Kremlin shorthand for demands to demilitarise Ukraine, and insisted on restricting domestic politics and blocking its path to NATO.
Some European politicians and commentators were scathing about the summit. “Putin got his red carpet treatment with Trump, while Trump got nothing,” Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to Washington, posted on X. In the meantime, the war rages on, as Russia and Ukraine carried out overnight air attacks, a daily occurrence, while fighting continued on the front.
Trump ‘charmed’ again by Putin
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, said: “Trump now appears to be shifting much of the responsibility onto Kyiv and Europe. Ukraine is likely to face increased pressure from the US to begin substantive discussions of Putin’s conditions.” She added that Trump was “once again clearly charmed and impressed by his interlocutor”, referring to the warm body language and effusive compliments the US president directed at Putin.
