Donald Trump urged the Ukrainian president to accept Russia's terms to end the war at a White House meeting on Friday, after Vladimir Putin said he would"destroy" Ukraine if he didn't. The meeting between the American and Ukrainian presidents often turned into"shouting duels", with Trump"constantly swearing", the Financial Times reports, citing sources close to the matter.
The US president reportedly threw aside maps of the Ukrainian front line during the meeting and insisted that Zelensky hand over the entire Donbas region to Putin. In the meantime, the sources said, he listed the points that the Russian president had made to him during their phone call the previous day. The US president appeared to take many of Putin’s arguments one for one, even if they contradicted his own recent statements about Russia’s weaknesses, European officials briefed on the meeting told the newspaper. This is also indicated by the US president’s statement on Fox News on Sunday that he was confident of securing an end to the conflict, adding that Putin “will take something, he has gained some assets.”
Although Trump was eventually persuaded to support a freeze on the current front lines, the acrimonious meeting was a spectacular display of the US president’s capriciousness in shifting positions on the war. It also showed his willingness to support Putin’s maximalist demands. The meeting ended up being as tense as the White House meeting in February, in which Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance both lashed out at Zelensky.
The White House and the Ukrainian presidential office did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the FT. However, Zelensky, as we reported, sent two tweets to his European allies on Sunday, including that Russia can only prevail through force and should not be allowed to do so.
The Ukrainian president traveled to the United States with the hope of receiving the Tomahawk missiles (which could also be called maneuvering drones) previously mentioned by Donald Trump. His negotiations have so far failed, and Trump is continuing his policy of delay: after he managed to persuade Putin to call him and initiate negotiations by promising to hand over the Tomahawks - which are expected to take place within two weeks, in Budapest. We have thoroughly explored why the Tomahawk issue is such a pressing issue in Moscow in this analysis.
Putin made an offer to Trump on Thursday that Ukraine would hand over parts of the eastern Donbas region it controls in exchange for some small areas of the two southern frontline regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia. The Russian proposal is a small concession from Putin’s last offer at a meeting in Alaska in August, where he said he would agree to freeze the line of contact in other parts of the frontline if Ukraine handed over Donbas.
“It is unacceptable for Ukrainian society to give [Donbas] to Russia without a fight, and Putin knows this,” Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, responded. He said Putin was pushing the controversial idea “with the aim of sowing division within Ukraine and undermining our unity.”
