Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the Trump administration this week with a sweeping proposal for a cease-fire in Ukraine, demanding major territorial concessions by Kyiv—and a push for global recognition of its claims—in exchange for a halt to the fighting, according to European and Ukrainian officials.
President Trump said Friday he would meet with Putin in Alaska on Aug. 15, following Putin’s proposal. He didn’t provide additional information about the meeting or the exact location. The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
WSJInteresting venue: Since the U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court, its arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin is not valid on American territory. Alaska is one of the few places where Putin can travel to, if Washington guarantees his safety. A frosty welcome, however.
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Chickening out?Trump had set Friday as a deadline for Putin to agree to an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, or face the new, aggressive sanctions. But Trump declined to say whether he is making good on his threat or allowing Putin a little more time now that a meeting has been agreed upon.
It's summer time in Alaska: relatively warm thanks to climate change. Putin's and Trump's meeting is supposed to develop a ceasefire formula for the Ukraine war. That's a useless exercise because Putin's conditions require Ukraine to commit suicide. So why meet in Anchorage? The meeting's only purpose is to save Trump's (Krasnov's) face one more time. Putin knows what everyone else knows: that Ukraine would rather continue fighting than commit suicide.
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“[Putin] wants a deal now that will effectively disarm Kyiv and put as much distance between it and allies safely confined to their own territories. No question of international peacekeeping or monitoring. In effect, permanent vulnerability. The prize this week for Putin would be a deal with Trump that Ukraine cannot accept, with the US then walking away and washing its hands of the conflict.
Europe Warns Trump: No Ukraine Peace Deal Without Kyiv — No Land Swaps Allies rally behind Zelensky as Trump readies Alaska meeting with Putin and floats a ceasefire plan that would let Russia keep the Donbas — a move seen as rewarding aggression.
Ukraine’s European allies rallied behind the war-torn country on Saturday, stressing the need to respect its national sovereignty and to include Kyiv in peace negotiations, following U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion of a land swap to end the conflict.
The renewed show of support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to defend his country against Moscow’s aggression comes ahead of the meeting Trump plans with Russian President Vladimir Putin set for this coming Friday in Alaska. “A diplomatic solution must protect Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests,” the leaders of the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Finland and the European Commission said in a joint statement issued late Saturday. “The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine,” they said. “We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force,” the leaders stressed.
Trump said on Friday that there will be “some swapping of territories” as part of a ceasefire deal between Russia and Ukraine, a proposition that was quickly rejected by Zelensky. Zelensky said Kyiv is “ready to work together with President Trump,” but any decisions made without Ukraine are “unworkable,” he added.
Trump is open to holding a trilateral summit in Alaska that would include Zelenskyy, a White House official told reporters on Saturday. But Washington is currently planning a bilateral meeting with Putin at his request, the official added.
Ukraine and its allies have no doubts “about America’s ability to ensure that the war ends,” Zelenskyy said in a separate statement Saturday. “The president of the United States has the leverage and the determination.” Under the proposal being floated by the Trump administration, the Kremlin would agree to a freeze of the war along the contact line in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where Russia controls less land than in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, a person familiar with the matter told POLITICO.
In return, Moscow would be allowed to keep the Donbas, said the person, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
European governments scrambled on Saturday to coordinate ahead of the Trump-Putin summit set for Aug. 15. British Foreign Secretary David Lammy arranged an urgent meeting of European and Ukrainian officials in the U.K. to discuss the prospects for a ceasefire agreement, in a gathering that included U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
In their statement late Saturday, the European leaders, emphasized that “international borders must not be changed by force” and stressed that a truce needs to be in place in order to facilitate peace talks. “Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a ceasefire or reduction of hostilities,” the leaders said. “Ukraine has the freedom of choice over its own destiny,” they added - Politico
Russia does not plan to return occupied lands to Ukraine or make peace, the Washington Post reported. According to a person familiar with the negotiations, Russia proposed to Kyiv to give up Donbas, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk regions, in exchange for a ceasefire, but without any other proposals in return.
The Kremlin does not want to return territories in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, where Russian military gains have provided Moscow with a valuable land bridge to occupied Crimea, the source said - Ukrainska Pravda
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said Europe lost significant time trying to appease Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump “by calling him ‘Daddy’ and what not.” He told Channel 4 News in the UK: “We did not prepare and now we are scrambling to figure out what needs to happen before the Friday summit. Well, the only thing that needs to happen is that Europe stands with Ukraine.” He questioned whether Europe had a Plan B ready in the case the U.S. and Europe diverge.
The US president has finally understood: Putin wants war—and will continue it as long as no one stops him... Ukraine has also refuted Trump's misunderstanding that only US arms deliveries kept them alive. He has since admitted that the Ukrainians are “fighting with tremendous courage.” The Ukrainians have so far withstood the Russian summer offensive remarkably well, both on the battlefield and in the cities.
"We are all following the commotion surrounding the meeting between the US and Russian presidents apparently have to pay a heavy price for this." scheduled for August 15. Everyone already knows that the conflict has deep roots in recent history, that there is no military solution, that Ukraine's accession to NATO is impossible, that Ukraine has been used by the West in an attempt to weaken Russia, which has failed, and that Ukraine will apparently have to pay a heavy price for this."
Trump could hand Putin far more than Ukraine. Europe should be afraid
The Russian President may well be approaching this week's meeting with far broader plans than Donald Trump once again endorsing his current war aims in Ukraine
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in 2019. Europe and Ukraine are bracing for a potentially catastrophic outcome to the Alaska summit between the two men this week.
There are few people outside the Kremlin and the White House who expect that anything good will come of Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meeting in Alaska at the end of this week. The only differences between predictions of what will be decided at the summit are how bad the outcome will be for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the United States itself.
The ostensible reason for the two to meet is to discuss an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. After Trump’s change in tone on the war following his most recent direct meeting with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, Putin needs face time with Trump to bring him around to backing Moscow again.
But Putin may well be approaching this meeting with far broader plans than Trump once again endorsing his current war aims.
Russia’s ambitions go much further than Ukraine. In December 2021, their extent was laid out in the so-called draft treaties presented to Nato and the United States, containing a wishlist that amounted to surrendering Europe to Russia.
The Nato Secretary General, Mark Rutte, appears already to be anticipating demands on Nato coming from this week’s summit.
While the purpose of Nato for Europe was once summarised as keeping the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down, the “treaties” and long-standing Russian proposals for a “new European security architecture” amount to getting the Russians in, the Americans out, and the Germans irrelevant.
ISW previously assessed that the Kremlin was dangling the prospect of bilateral arms control talks to extract preemptive concessions from the United States about the war
in Ukraine.[22]
NYT“The war will be frozen, not ended. Ukraine will lose the occupied territories because unfortunately there is no force that can drive the Russians back. But Ukraine will not really lose them. They will be controlled de facto by the Russians, but the West and Kyiv will not recognise this and will pretend instead that legally they belong to Ukraine. It would mean an end to the war, but not peace. No formal peace treaty would be needed, so the territories occupied by Moscow would not be legally recognised as Russian. The question of ownership could be postponed for months, years or decades. In Korea it's been like that for more than seventy years.”
Former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis called the NATO’s chief’s conditions “sickening.” Here are his remarks from a Twitter post from earlier today: “If Ukraine has no choice but to accept “de facto” occupation — that’s because WE failed. Not because Ukrainians failed, not because some mysterious “shit happened”, but because for years we ignored all the warnings, repeated all the mistakes of history, kicked the can down the road and refused to do what it takes to defend the rules and principles that enable sustainable peace and prosperity. This is on us. We are the architects of this de facto defeat, so now we are trying to pretend it came out of nowhere and we did the best we could to stop it. In a spectacular display of unbombed westsplaining, Mark Rutte is suggesting that everything will be OK in the long run, like it was OK in the Baltic States after decades of de facto occupation by jolly old Uncle Joe Stalin. Well, I have shrugged off a lot of dumb hot takes about my country over the last few years, but this one is literally sickening. Rutte is revealing that the latest genius 5D chess move to save Ukraine is to casually throw millions of people into a black hole of oppression, torture, rape, kidnapping, murder and destruction of national identity — “de facto, but not de jure”. And the proponents of this plan will keep a straight face while they cite the misery of the occupation of the Baltic States as a shining example that Ukraine should happily walk into.
