U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin talk during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam November 11, 2017. Photographer Jorge Silva/File Photo
By Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15 in Alaska to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, Trump said on Friday.
Trump made the highly anticipated announcement on social media after he said that the parties, including Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, were close to a ceasefire deal that could resolve the three-and-a-half-year conflict, one that could require Ukraine to surrender significant territory.
Addressing reporters at the White House earlier on Friday, Trump suggested an agreement would involve some exchange of land.
“There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” the Republican president said.
However, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that Ukraine could not violate its constitution on the territorial issues, adding that “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupiers.”
The Kremlin confirmed the summit in an online statement.
The two leaders will “focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said.
“This will evidently be a challenging process, but we will engage in it actively and energetically,” Ushakov said.
In a video address to the nation posted on his Telegram channel on Saturday, Zelenskiy said that any decisions without Ukraine would be decisions against peace.
“They will not achieve anything. These are stillborn decisions. They are unworkable decisions. And we all need real and genuine peace,” Zelenskiy said.
Putin claims four Ukrainian regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. His forces do not fully control all the territory in the four regions.
Earlier, Bloomberg News reported that U.S. and Russian officials were working towards an agreement that would lock in Moscow’s occupation of territory seized during its military invasion.