The U.S. president has suggested the meeting could see some ‘land-swapping,’ raising concerns in Kyiv and Brussels.
U.S. President Donald Trump is set to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Aug. 15 amid limited expectations of any significant breakthroughs in peace negotiations in the Russia-Ukraine war.
In recent months, Kyiv and its Western supporters, including the United States, have called for a temporary halt to the fighting as a first step towards a permanent settlement.
Moscow, however, rejects the notion of a temporary cease-fire, which, it believes, would allow Kyiv to reconstitute its battered forces—and rearm—before a resumption of fighting.
Emboldened by ongoing gains on the battlefield, Moscow has stuck to its core conditions for peace, saying it wants a final, comprehensive settlement.
These conditions include the full withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, all of which it claimed to have annexed in 2022 and now views as Russian territory.
It also wants Kyiv to stop mobilizing its forces and halt the procurement of Western weapons, in addition to guarantees that Ukraine will never join the NATO alliance.
While the Trump administration has hinted at a willingness to allow room for some—if not all—of these demands, Kyiv and its European backers reject any notion of ceding territory to Russia.
Trump himself has given few indications as to what he expects to come out of the summit.
“This is really a feel-out meeting,” he told reporters on Aug. 11.
‘Land-Swapping’
In recent remarks, Trump has said that both sides would have to cede territory as part of any permanent settlement.
“There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both [sides],” he told reporters on Aug. 8.
A day later, however, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeated his longstanding position that Ukrainians would “not gift their land to the occupiers,” which, he said, would violate Ukraine’s constitution.
In a video address, he said that any decision made at the summit without Kyiv’s consent would be “stillborn” and would “not achieve anything.”
The European Union, meanwhile, said that Ukraine must not be forced to make concessions, citing its “inherent right … to choose its own destiny.”
Nevertheless, on Aug. 11, Trump repeated his contention that, at the upcoming summit, there would be “some land swapping going on.”
He acknowledged that Russia had captured some “very prime territory,” adding: “We’re going to try to get some of that territory back.”
By Adam Morrow
