Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy won backing from Europe and NATO on Sunday as he rallied diplomatic support. It comes ahead of a Russia-U.S. summit this week, where Kyiv fears Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump may try to dictate terms for ending the three-and-a-half-year war.
Trump, who for weeks had been threatening new sanctions against Russia for failing to halt the conflict, announced instead last Friday that he would hold the Aug. 15 summit with Putin in Alaska.
A White House official said on Saturday that Trump was open to Zelenskyy’s attendance, but that the current preparations were for a bilateral meeting with Putin.
The Kremlin leader last week ruled out meeting Zelenskyy, saying the conditions for such an encounter were “unfortunately still far” from being met.
Trump said a potential deal would involve “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both [sides],” a statement that compounded Ukrainian alarm that it may face pressure to surrender more land. Zelenskyy says any decisions taken without Ukraine will be “stillborn” and unworkable.
Potential of Russia-U.S. deal
On Saturday, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Finland and the European Commission said that any diplomatic solution must protect the security interests of Ukraine and Europe.
“The U.S. has the power to force Russia to negotiate seriously,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Sunday.
EU foreign ministers will meet on Monday to discuss next steps, she said.
U.S. Vice-President JD Vance said in a Fox News interview that a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine is unlikely to satisfy either side, and any peace deal will likely leave both Moscow and Kyiv “unhappy.”
He said the U.S. is aiming for a settlement both countries can accept.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told ABC News that Friday’s summit “will be about testing Putin, how serious he is on bringing this terrible war to an end.”
“It will be, of course, about security guarantees, but also about the absolute need to acknowledge that Ukraine decides on its own future, that Ukraine has to be a sovereign nation, deciding on its own geopolitical future.”
Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, now holds nearly a fifth of the country.
Rutte said a future peace deal could not include legal recognition of Russian control over Ukrainian land, although it might include de facto recognition.
He compared it to the situation after the Second World War when the United States accepted that the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were de facto controlled by the Soviet Union, but did not legally recognize their annexation.
Russian officials criticize Europe
Zelenskyy said on Sunday, “The end of the war must be fair, and I am grateful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people today.”
Andrew Rasiulis, a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a retired Department of National Defence official, joins us to talk about the latest news that a Trump-Putin meeting may happen in the next week, and what the Witkoff-Putin meeting signals.
A European official said Europe had come up with a counterproposal to Trump’s, but declined to provide details. Russian officials accused Europe of trying to thwart Trump’s efforts to end the war.
“The Euro-imbeciles are trying to prevent American efforts to help resolve the Ukrainian conflict,” former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted on social media on Sunday.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a vituperative statement that the relationship between Ukraine and the European Union resembled “necrophilia.”
Roman Alekhin, a Russian war blogger, said Europe had been reduced to the role of a spectator.
“If Putin and Trump reach an agreement directly, Europe will be faced with a fait accompli. Kyiv, even more so,” he said.
Captured territory
No details of the proposed territorial swap to which Trump alluded have been officially announced.
In addition to Crimea, which it seized in 2014, Russia has formally claimed the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as its own, although it controls only about 70 per cent of the last three. It holds smaller pieces of territory in three other regions, while Ukraine says it holds a sliver of Russia’s Kursk region.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, said a swap could entail Russia handing over 1,500 square kilometres to Ukraine and obtaining 7,000 square kilometres, which he said Russia would capture anyway within about six months.
He provided no evidence to back those figures. Russia took only about 500 square kilometres of territory in July, according to Western military analysts, who say its grinding advances have come at the cost of very high casualties.
Ukraine and its European allies have been haunted for months by the fear that Trump, keen to claim credit for making peace and hoping to seal lucrative joint business deals between the U.S. and Russia, could align with Putin to cut a deal that would be deeply disadvantageous to Kyiv.
They had drawn some encouragement lately as Trump, having piled heavy pressure on Zelenskyy and berated him publicly in the Oval Office in February, began criticizing Putin. Russia has recently pounded Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with its heaviest air attacks of the war.
But the impending Putin-Trump summit, agreed to during a trip to Moscow by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff last week, has revived fears that Kyiv and Europe could be sidelined.
“What we will see emerge from Alaska will almost certainly be a catastrophe for Ukraine and Europe,” wrote Phillips P. O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
“And Ukraine will face the most terrible dilemma. Do they accept this humiliating and destructive deal? Or do they go it alone, unsure of the backing of European states?”
Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said on Ukrainian radio on Sunday that Kyiv’s partnership with its European allies was critical to countering any attempts to keep it away from the table.
“For us right now, a joint position with the Europeans is our main resource.”