Trump Downplays Expectations for Reaching Summit Deal With Putin

President Donald Trump downplayed expectations for his upcoming meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine, casting it as a “feel-out meeting” and saying he would confer with Ukraine and European leaders after the sitdown.

“I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, You got to end this war. You got to end it,” Trump said Monday at a White House press conference. The comments come ahead of an Aug. 15 summit with Putin in Alaska, the Russian leader’s first visit to US soil in nearly a decade.

“It’s not up to me to make a deal. I think a deal can be made for both,” Trump added. 

He indicated he did not plan to invite Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the summit, saying the next step after the Alaska meeting would be for Putin and the Ukrainian president to meet directly. Trump said he would mediate that conversation, if necessary.

“I would say he could go but he’s gone to a lot of meetings,” Trump said of Zelenskiy. “You know, he’s been there for three-and-a-half years, nothing happened.”

Trump said he expected to confer with Zelenskiy and European allies by phone immediately after his meeting with Putin. The president said he expected to either outline to them the contours of a deal that included land swaps negotiated with Putin or that he did not believe a peace deal could be brokered.

“I think we’ll have constructive conversations then after that meeting, immediately, maybe as I’m flying out, maybe, as I’m leaving the room, I’ll be calling the European leaders,” Trump said.

This week’s meeting with Putin represents a high-stakes gamble for the US president, who campaigned on ending the war quickly but whose efforts have been frustrated in office. Putin is demanding that Ukraine cede Crimea, which his forces illegally annexed in 2014, as well as the entire eastern Donbas region, which would require Zelenskiy to order a withdrawal of troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv.

Trump said there may be “some changes” in land. “We’re going to change the lines, the battlelines. Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They’ve occupied some very prime territory. We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he added.

Such an arrangement would hand Russia a victory that its army has not been able to achieve militarily since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The prospect of Trump and Putin negotiating a deal that swaps land for peace has alarmed European leaders, fearful that the US president will concede too much and leave Ukraine without security guarantees against further Russian aggression or stick allies with policing an uncertain truce.

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