US President Donald Trump has said his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy can end Russia’s war if he wants to, but there would be “no going into NATO by Ukraine” as part of a peace deal on Sunday.
Before his much-anticipated meeting with Zelenskyy at the White House, the US President has also reportedly said Ukraine would not regain control of the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014, eight years before launching its full-scale invasion.
It follows Trump dropping a ceasefire demand and calling instead for a permanent peace deal following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, reports BBC.
A US envoy said on Sunday that Putin had agreed to a possible NATO-like security pact for Ukraine. The Russian president has consistently opposed the idea of Ukraine joining the military alliance.
Posting on his Truth Social platform on Sunday night, Trump said: “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.
“Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE. Some things never change!!!” Trump added.
Before Trump’s return to power in January, NATO countries agreed on Kyiv’s “irreversible path” to membership in the alliance. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, alongside European leaders including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, will join Zelenskyy in Washington for talks on Ukraine’s future on Monday.
Also attending are French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. It is unclear how many of them will go to the White House.
Trump later added: “Big day at the White House tomorrow. Never had so many European Leaders at one time. My great honor to host them!!!”
For so many heads of state to travel with such little notice across the Atlantic to what is essentially a wartime crisis meeting appears without precedent in the modern era, underscoring the sky-high stakes.
Diplomatic sources say European officials are concerned that Trump may try to press Zelenskyy to agree to terms, after the Ukrainian leader was excluded from the Trump-Putin meeting last Friday. But US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told news sources that any suggestion Zelenskyy might be bullied by Trump into accepting a peace deal was a “stupid media narrative”.
Instead, Trump might be planning to press Zelenskyy to surrender the entirety of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in return for Russia freezing the rest of the front line – a proposal put forward by Putin in Alaska.
Luhansk is already almost entirely under Russian control. But Ukraine is estimated to have held onto about 30 percent of Donetsk, including several key cities and fortifications, at a cost of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. Donbas, as the two regions are called together, are rich in minerals and industry.
Moreover, more than three million currently live under Russian occupation in Donbas—after 1.5 million Ukrainians have already fled the region since 2014. A further 300,000 are estimated to be in the parts where Ukraine still has control.
About 75 percent of Ukrainians are against formal cessation of land to Russia, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, and any handover of the nation’s territory requires the approval of the parliament and a referendum of the people.
Following Zelenskyy’s disastrous meeting in the Oval Office in February—where the US leader accused him of “gambling with World War Three”—relations between the two nations saw a slight improvement. Ukraine signed a minerals agreement in April that gave the US a financial stake in the country, and their leaders spoke privately at the Vatican before Pope Francis’s funeral. Ukraine made clear it was willing to pay for US weapons.
By July, the two leaders had a phone call that the Ukrainian president described as “the best conversation we have had”.
Meanwhile, Trump had begun to express exasperation with Russia’s unrelenting onslaught in Ukraine. He called Putin “absolutely crazy”, drastically shortened his deadline for a peace deal, and threatened economic sanctions on Moscow. As these deliberations grind on, Russian forces continue to advance on the battlefield. They now occupy almost a fifth of Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
A virtual summit was held on Sunday between Zelenskyy and the so-called “coalition of the willing”—a group of nations including the UK, France, and Germany that have pledged to protect peace in Ukraine once it is achieved. Afterwards, Emmanuel Macron told reporters their plan was to “present a united front” for Monday’s talks with Trump.
Zelenskyy and the NATO leaders said they were keen to learn more after US envoy Steve Witkoff told US television that Putin had agreed on Friday to “robust security guarantees that I would describe as game-changing”. Witkoff said such an agreement could see Europe and the US protect Ukraine from further aggression with a NATO-like defence agreement.
Putin has long opposed Ukraine joining NATO, and Witkoff said the arrangement could be an alternative if the Ukrainians “can live with it”.
After the Alaska summit, Trump informed the European allies that Putin reiterated his demand for Donbas in eastern Ukraine, according to European officials.
Zelenskyy stressed at Sunday’s virtual summit with NATO leaders that the Ukrainian constitution makes it impossible to give up territory – and that this should only be discussed by the leaders of Ukraine and Russia at a trilateral summit with the US.