Fresh off the high of overseeing a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, President Donald Trump is ramping up his efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Ahead of a potential meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska next week, Trump announced that the two countries were close to reaching a deal that would involve some “swapping of territories.”
“You’re looking at territory that’s been fought over for three and a half years,” Trump said. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”
Trump’s announcement came as a surprise to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who responded in a video posted Saturday morning with an emphatic refusal to cede any Ukrainian territory to Russia.
“The answer to the Ukrainian territorial question is already in the Constitution of Ukraine. No one will retreat from this and no one can. Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” Zelensky said.
Reports have since emerged that the White House is now considering inviting Zelensky to the peace talks in Alaska.
Several sources told NBC News that the possibility was being discussed, and that many are hopeful Ukraine will be included in discussions about its own future.
A White House official told NBC, however, “The President remains open to a trilateral summit with both leaders. Right now, the White House is focusing on planning the bilateral meeting requested by President Putin.”
In a post made to X on Thursday, prior to the announcement of Trump and Putin’s planned talks in Alaska, Zelensky wrote, ”Ukraine is not afraid of meetings and expects the same brave approach from the Russian side. It is time we ended the war. Thank you to everyone who is helping.”
Late last month, Trump reversed an earlier decision to make a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders a condition of any subsequent meetings between himself and Putin.
The president previously set a deadline of last Friday for Putin to make a peace deal or face sanctions, moving forward an earlier deadline of Sept. 3.
Announcing his decision to bring the deadline forward, Trump said, “We thought we had [a deal] settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever.
”You have bodies lying all over the street. And I say, ‘That’s not the way to do it.’”
