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Nov. 7 (UPI) — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited the White House Friday for a summit with President Donald Trump and lavished praise on the president while disparaging former President Joe Biden.

“The reason why we are here, to open a new chapter between the bilateral relation between the United States and Hungary basically because during the Democrat administration everything was rigged,” Orbán said, according to The Hill.

“Everything was basically broke, ruined, cancelled. A lot of harm done by the previous administration,” he said. “You’ve improved the bilateral relationship. You repaired what was done badly by the previous administration, so now we are in quite a good position to open up a new chapter. Let’s say a golden age between the United States and Hungary.”

Orbán wants Trump to come to Budapest and to meet with Russia President Vladimir Putin about the Ukraine war. Trump has already canceled one meeting, saying he didn’t want to “have a waste of time.”

Orbán also came to the White House to ask Trump to give Hungary an exception to the sanctions on buying Russian oil. The president said he might exempt Hungary from those sanctions.

He also called on European leaders to be more respectful of Orbán, who has faced battles with them over migration, democracy and rule of law.

“I think they should respect Hungary and respect this leader very, very strongly because he’s been right on immigration,” Trump said.

Hungary claims it must buy Russian oil because it has no other viable source.

“We’re looking at it because it’s very difficult for him to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said. “It’s a big country, but they don’t have sea. They don’t have the ports. And so they have a difficult problem.”

He also accused other European countries of buying Russian oil and gas. They “don’t have those problems, and they buy a lot of oil and gas from Russia. And, as they know, I’m very disturbed by that.”

Trump and Orbán are both conservative leaders who share similar values, including a dislike of immigration.

“Look what’s happened to Europe with the immigration. They have people flooding Europe,” Trump said. “You go to some of the countries, they’re unrecognizable now because of what they’ve done. And Hungary is very recognizable.”

Orbán defended his migration policies, blaming Europe.

“This is the absurd world we are living in now in Europe,” Orbán said. “We are the only government in Europe which considers itself as a Christian government. All the other governments in Europe are basically liberal leftist governments.”

In September, Trump lifted travel restrictions against Hungarians, readmitting them to the Visa Waiver program. Biden had added restrictions against Hungarians when he learned that Budapest was granting Hungarian citizenship without adequate security measures.

The Guardian reported that at Friday’s meeting, Orbán was expected to try to set up another meeting between the two leaders not only to broker peace in Ukraine, but to also boost his own standing as a statesman.

Citing insiders, the news outlet said the far-right leader is facing stiff opposition ahead of April’s parliamentary elections, and a visit from Trump would potentially boost support among conservatives.

“Orbán wants Trump to come to Budapest before the elections,” an unnamed source working in the Hungarian government told The Guardian. “This is a top priority. They will discuss the Russian gas issue, but the thing Orbán cares about the most is the elections.”

In a post on X on Thursday, Orbán said Trump’s first 10 months back in office have repaired the relationship between the United States and Hungary. He said the Biden administration damaged that relationship through “politically motivated sanctions.”

“Our goal is to establish a strategic partnership that includes energy cooperation, investments, defense collaboration, and discussions on the post-war landscape following the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” Orbán wrote.

“We are working on an agreement based on mutual benefits — one that serves the interests of every Hungarian citizen.”

Trump told reporters last week that Orbán wants an exemption from the oil and gas sanctions.

“We haven’t granted one, but he has asked,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. “He’s a friend of mine. He’s asked for an exemption.”

WASHINGTON — Plans are on hold for President Trump to sit down with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to talk about resolving the war in Ukraine, according to a U.S. official.

The meeting had been announced last week. It was supposed to take place in Budapest, although a date had not been set.

The decision was made following a call between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The official requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The back-and-forth over Trump’s plans are the latest bout of whiplash caused by his stutter-step efforts to resolve a conflict that has persisted for nearly four years.

Lee writes for the Associated Press. This is a developing story that will update.

We’ve read quite a bit about President Trump’s “hot mic” comment, during a meeting with European leaders about the Russian war against Ukraine, that Vladimir Putin “wants to make a deal for me, as crazy as it sounds.”

Pundits debated whether this was an embarrassment for Trump; they wondered why he would say such an important thing in a whisper to French President Emmanuel Macron — as if Trump’s verbal goulash were something new. Headlines were full of the word “deal” for a while, including three days later, when they were reporting that Trump said Putin might not want “to make a deal.” And, of course, there is no deal.

The press coverage of the meeting in Alaska said there were lots of “constructive” conversations. Putin spoke about “neighborly” talks and the “constructive atmosphere of mutual respect” in his conversations with Trump. There were reports about agreements “in principle” on various things under discussion, although there were no details about what they might be.

I covered more than a few superpower summits, first as a reporter for the Associated Press and later for the New York Times. Although that was more than 30 years ago, the smoke and mirrors nonsense usually produced by meetings like these has not changed. Verbal gas is abundant and facts almost nonexistent. Trump’s comments were worth about as much as anything else he has said on the subject, which is almost nothing. And yet, they were reported and parsed endlessly as if they had the same meaning as other presidents’ words had in the past.

I had a powerful sense of deja vu from a five-day trip to Afghanistan in January 1987. The Kremlin had finally agreed to let a group of Western journalists visit Kabul and Jalalabad to witness the “cease-fire” that had been announced a few days before we arrived. The visit was billed as an Afghan government tour, which nobody — especially the Afghan government — believed.

We saw no fighting, although we could see artillery fire in the hills at night. Some of the “specials,” as we wire service correspondents called the major media then, reported that we were fired on. We were not.

Mostly, we shopped for rugs and drank cold Heinekens, which were unavailable in Moscow but mysteriously well stocked at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. We were ushered to various peace and unity events between the Afghan and Russian peoples and toured the huge Soviet military camps just outside Kabul with a U.S. official (allegedly a diplomat from the Embassy, but we knew from experience that this person was from the Central Intelligence Agency).

On Jan. 19, we were taken (each reporter in an individual government car with a minder) to a news conference by Mohammad Najib, the Afghan leader whose name had been Najibullah until he changed it to make it sound less religious for his Bolshevik friends. Najib said that Afghanistan and the Soviet Union had agreed “in principle” on a “timetable for withdrawal” of Soviet occupation forces.

At that point, the Reuters correspondent, who was fairly new to Moscow still, bolted from the room and raced back to our hotel, where there was one Telex machine for us all to send our stories back to Moscow. He filed a bulletin on the announcement. When the rest of us made our leisurely return, we were greeted with messages from our home offices demanding to know about the big deal to end the war in Afghanistan.

We wrote our stories, which were about a business-as-usual press conference that yielded no real news. We each appended a message to explain why the Reuters report was just plain wrong. Talk of Soviet withdrawal was common, and always wrong. The very idea that the puppet government in Kabul had something to say about it or was a party to any serious discussions about ending the war was absurd. The most pithy comment came from the Agence France-Presse reporter, who told her editors that the Reuters story was “merde.” The Soviet military did not withdraw until February 1989, more than two years later, following its own schedule.

Much of the recent coverage about Russia and Ukraine reminds me of that Afghan news flash in 1987. The Kremlin has never been, was not then and is not now interested in negotiation or compromise. Under Soviet communism and under Putin, diplomacy is a zero-sum game whose only goal is to restore Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe. And yet, for some reason, the American media and the country’s diplomats seem as oblivious today as they always were. After the summit, they announced breathlessly that there was no peace deal out of the summit, although they all knew going in that there was no deal on the table and there never was going to be one.

But of course Putin wants a “deal” on Ukraine. It’s the same deal he has wanted since he violated international law (not for the first time) and invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. He wants to redraw the boundaries of Ukraine to give him even more territory than he has already seized, and he wants to be sure Ukraine remains out of NATO and under Moscow’s military thumb as he has done with other former Soviet regions, like Georgia, which he invaded in 2008 as soon as the country dared to suggest it might be interested in NATO membership. His latest nonsense was to demand that Russia be part of any postwar security arrangements. He wants the NATO allies to stop treating him like the war criminal that he is and to be seen as an equal actor on the international stage with NATO and especially the United States.

That he got, in abundance, from Trump in Alaska, starting with the location. Trump invited Putin to the United States during a period of travel bans to and from Russia, immediately giving the Russian dictator a huge PR win. It also, conveniently, put him in the only NATO country where he is not wanted on charges of crimes against humanity.

As for peace talks, check the headlines from Ukraine before, during and after the Alaska summit: The Russians have stepped up their killing and destruction in Ukraine with new ferocity and have been grabbing as much land in eastern Ukraine as they can. Every square inch of that land — and more the Kremlin has not yet occupied — will be part of any “deal” that Putin will accept. Trump himself has been talking about “land swaps” (as he has from the start of the war, by the way) — a nonsensical idea when you consider the land Ukraine holds is its sovereign territory and the land Russian holds was stolen.

The brilliant M. Gessen, perhaps the leading authority on dictatorship, published an essay in the New York Review, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” shortly after the 2016 election. “Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality,” they wrote.

A U.S. president and a Russian leader sitting down to talk and emerging with bluster about progress seems normal enough, perhaps encouraging when American-Russian relations have been at a historic low. Just remember that coming from these two men, the comments signify nothing — or, worse, make us wonder what Trump has given away to Putin with his talk of land swaps.

Andrew Rosenthal, a former reporter, editor and columnist, was Moscow bureau chief for the Associated Press and Washington editor and later editorial page editor for the New York Times.

Kyiv, Ukraine – The Alaska summit between United States President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was a masterclass in how a former intelligence officer uses his skills of manipulation on a self-centred narcissist.

That’s the impression Ukrainian analyst Maria Kucherenko got when watching the interaction between Trump and Putin during their summit on Friday, which broke no ground in stopping Europe’s hottest war since 1945.

Putin “worked [Trump] well”, the analyst with Come Back Alive, a Kyiv-based charity, told Al Jazeera, referring to the years Putin spent as a Soviet spy in East Germany recruiting informants.

On the tarmac at Elmendorf-Richardson, a Cold War-era airbase outside Alaska’s capital, Anchorage, Putin greeted Trump with a “good morning, dear neighbour,” referring to Alaska’s proximity to northeastern Russia.

Trump literally rolled out a red carpet for Putin, gave him a long handshake and a ride in “The Beast”, the presidential limousine – and Putin beamed from the backseat.

During a brief news conference, Putin kept thanking Trump, repeating and rephrasing what the American president had said about the talks, Ukraine and a possible peace settlement.

Putin flattered Trump, including by backing the US leader’s assertions – such as his claim that he could have prevented the Russian-Ukrainian war had he won the 2020 presidential vote instead of Joe Biden.

“Today, President Trump was saying that had he been president back then, there would be no war, and I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so,” the smiling Putin told reporters after the talks. “I can confirm that.”

And it was Putin’s manipulation masterfully disguised as saccharine flattery that ended the talks with Trump’s conclusion that “there’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Kucherenko said.

“He fed the narcissist with whatever one needs to feed a narcissist into manipulating him – endless quotes, the endless ‘how the American president said’, endless appellations to the topics [Trump] is interested in,” said Kucherenko, who authored analytical reports on Russia’s military and addressed the US Congress at a 2024 hearing.

‘Nothing concrete’

Putin’s remarks at the news conference after the talks lasted for eight minutes and included a lecture on when czarist Russia owned Alaska and how the Soviet and US militaries partnered during World War II.

He spoke more than twice as long as Trump, who talked for only three minutes and admitted that the talks resulted in an agreement to hold more talks.

“There were many, many points that we agreed on, most of them, I would say, a couple of big ones that we haven’t quite gotten there, but we’ve made some headway. So there’s no deal until there’s a deal,” the US president said.

Trump and Putin also refused to take questions.

As a result, the summit ended with “nothing concrete”, Kucherenko said, as Putin said the “root causes” of the war should be addressed before any ceasefire or real steps towards a peace settlement are made.

“In order to make the [future peace] settlement lasting and long term, we need to eliminate all the primary roots, the primary causes of that conflict, and we’ve said it multiple times, to consider all legitimate concerns of Russia,” Putin said.

“Root causes” is Putin’s code for rejecting Ukraine’s existence outside Moscow’s political shadow and denying its very sovereignty.

The China angle

However, the talks were not a total triumph for Putin, another Ukrainian observer said.

They lasted for less than three hours instead of the seven that Russian officials had announced, and there was no bread broken over a joint lunch.

And what was discussed behind closed doors went far beyond the war.

“Russia works through economy and geopolitics, offers Trump profit here and now, and also haggles over the topic of containing China,” Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevych told Al Jazeera.

“Based on that, the Kremlin is trying to gain political concessions that could help Russia confirm its ambitions for the status of a geopolitical centre, ” he said.

“And Ukraine is just a derivative part – an important but derivative one – of these processes,” he said.

As the White House wants to prevent the fusion of Moscow’s and Beijing’s interests, Trump finds it beneficial to negotiate business projects and political interactions with Moscow, Tyshkevych said.

“As a result, the United States is not interested in a total defeat and a crisis for Russia. Alas for us,” he said.

However, both Washington and Beijing wouldn’t agree with boosting Moscow’s geopolitical role to the status of a third global power, so the White House only “partially understands” Putin’s ambitions, he said.

What’s next?

For Ukraine, it all means more hostilities and attacks by Russian drones and missiles – while Moscow would boost mobilisation of men of fighting age, he said.

One of Ukraine’s pre-eminent military analysts, meanwhile, is pessimistic about the summit’s outcomes.

The very fact of a face-to-face with Trump on American soil means Putin was “legitimised” and raised from the role of a political pariah, Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the Ukrainian military’s General Staff, told Al Jazeera.

“He was legitimised in an absolutely unacceptable way” while being an “international evil man who should be held responsible for his actions”, Romanenko said.

“Yet again, Trump didn’t fulfil his promises about sanctions [on Russia], didn’t reach a position on a ceasefire,” he said.

Ukraine, therefore, will have to continue its “complicated fight until Trump grows his willpower and political will”, the general said.

Russia will accelerate its attempts to break through Ukraine’s defence lines in the east and will resume its devastating air strikes with drones and missiles, he said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities will need to make strategic decisions to start a “full and just” mobilisation of men of fighting age and focus the economy on military needs, Romanenko said.

The highly anticipated meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin ended without a ceasefire deal to stop the war in Ukraine. Trump said he would brief Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the talks, but there was no clear plan agreed for the Ukrainian president to meet with Putin for further negotiations. v

In the lead-up to his much-touted Friday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, United States President Donald Trump expressed confidence in his ability to make concrete progress towards securing a ceasefire in Ukraine at the meeting.

Putin received the red carpet treatment as he was met with a lengthy handshake by Trump as he deplaned at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson military facility in the Alaskan city of Anchorage.

The warm greeting set a congenial tone for what were always going to be tough negotiations. But there was a more subdued atmosphere a few hours later as Trump and Putin departed on their respective planes – with no clear breakthrough on the war in Ukraine.

Here are some key takeaways from their meeting:

‘No deal until there’s a deal’

While the meeting was anticipated to take about seven hours, it wrapped up in less than three. Trump and Putin addressed a gathering of journalists after the talks with relatively brief pre-prepared statements. Neither leader took any questions.

Putin said his country is committed to ending the war, but the conflict’s “primary causes” must be eliminated for an agreement to be long-lasting.

Putin also warned Ukraine and the European Union against throwing a “wrench in the works” and cautioned against attempts to use “backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress”.

A relatively subdued Trump praised the “extremely productive meeting”, in which he said “many points were agreed to”. He said there is a “very good chance of getting there” – referring to a ceasefire – but conceded that there remain sticking points with Moscow, including at least one “significant” one.

He cautioned that it’s “ultimately up to them” – referring to Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” he said.

And there was none by the time Trump and Putin left Alaska.

A PR coup for Putin

The Russian leader has become an increasingly maligned and isolated figure in the West since waging war on Ukraine in February 2022.

But on Friday, that ended, with a red carpet welcome, a flypast by US fighter jets and warm applause from Trump.

Putin himself seemed pleased, grinning out the window as he drove off the tarmac with Trump in the presidential Cadillac limousine known as “The Beast”.

“For three years they [Western media] have been talking about Russia’s isolation, and today they saw the red carpet that greeted the Russian president in the United States,” Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gloated after the summit, on Telegram.

Talking business

Before the meeting, it was widely anticipated that Putin would attempt to dilute peace talks with talk of bilateral trade and cooperation.

Trump had asserted that there would be no discussion of business with Putin until the pair had made substantive progress on bringing about a ceasefire in Ukraine.

This plan, however, seems to have been derailed somewhat, with the Russian president saying in his post-meeting statement that the pair discussed their collaboration in the areas of tech and space.

“It’s clear that US and Russian investment and business cooperation has tremendous potential. Russia and the US can offer each other so much. In trade, digital, high-tech and in space exploration, [and] we see that Arctic cooperation is also very possible,” he told reporters.

Russia has previously tried to pitch its vast reserves of rare earth minerals – critical for several cutting edge sectors – to the US to broker a breakthrough.

Next up: Another meeting – and pressure on Ukraine

As Trump thanked Putin for his time, he said he hoped they would meet again soon. Putin quickly responded by saying, in English with a laugh, “Next time, in Moscow”.

“I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening,” he said in response.

Trump has previously asserted that he hopes to host a trilateral meeting on ending the war in Ukraine very soon, this time attended by Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, too. In Alaska, the US leader said he would now call NATO officials and Zelenskyy to discuss the meeting.

In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump was asked how he rated the summit on a scale of 10. He described the meet as a “10 out of 10”.

“We got along great,” he said.

Then, he emphasised the importance of the Ukrainian leader agreeing to a deal.

“Now, it’s really up to President Zelenskyy to get it done. And I would also say the European nations, they have to get involved a little bit. But it’s up to President Zelenskyy,” he said, adding that he’ll attend the next meeting “if they’d like”.

“Make a deal,” he said, in a message apparently for Zelenskyy.

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin held what was billed as a joint press conference after their meeting in Alaska on Friday.

After the leaders left the room, BBC North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher and Russia editor Steve Rosenberg stayed on to unpack the takeaways.

Video produced by Meiying Wu.

United States President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday in a bid to find common ground that could lead to a lasting ceasefire deal in Russia’s three-year-long war on Ukraine.

The highly anticipated meeting is the latest in Trump’s numerous, but so far unsuccessful, attempts to end the Ukraine war and keep the promises he made on the campaign trail last year, when he claimed he would end the conflict within 24 hours if elected.

It also marks the first time in a decade that Putin will visit the US, as well as the first-ever visit of a Russian leader to Alaska.

While President Trump has tried to downplay expectations ahead of the meeting, he also warned on Thursday that Russia could face “serious consequences” if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire.

Here’s what to know about the Alaska meeting:

When and where are Trump and Putin meeting?

Both leaders will meet at the US military’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska.

The time of the meeting is scheduled for about 11:30am Alaska time (19:30 GMT), although this could change.

Accompanying Russian delegation members include: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defence Minister Andrei Belousov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov, and Special Presidential Envoy on Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation Kirill Dmitriev.

It is not yet clear who will accompany Trump for the meeting from the US side.

Are Zelenskyy and European leaders attending?

No, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not attend the Alaska meeting, nor will European leaders.

Asked why Zelenskyy was not at the table, Trump chided the Ukrainian president at a White House news briefing on August 11, saying that Zelenskyy had ruled for three years and “nothing happened” in terms of ending the war.

“I would say he could go, but he’s gone to a lot of meetings,” Trump said.

Analyst Neil Melvin of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank, said Europe was essentially an observer in a matter that could determine its fate because it lacked leverage. “​European leaders have been relegated to the margins with the [European Union] seen by Trump and Putin as largely irrelevant,” he said.

Ahead of the meeting, on Wednesday, Trump, alongside US Vice President JD Vance, held a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and other European leaders. Analysts say it was a final attempt on the part of the Europeans to steer the meeting in Ukraine’s favour.

Zelenskyy joined the virtual meeting from Berlin. Other leaders who attended were from Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Finland and Poland. European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen and NATO chief Mark Rutte were also present.

What’s the significance of Alaska as the venue?

Alaska, which is located northwest of the US mainland, is the closest point at which Russia and the US are neighbours. The US state is closer to Russia than it is to the US mainland. On the Russian side, it is closest to the autonomous Chukotka district.

Originally inhabited by Indigenous Americans, the region was first colonised by the old Russian empire in the 18th century. Due to the high costs of maintaining the faraway location, Moscow sold Alaska to the US in 1867 for $7.2m, the equivalent of $162m today. Russian influence still abounds in the region, visible in the Russian Orthodox churches still present, and even in the Russian surnames of some Alaskans.

The Elmendorf-Richardson base, where the meeting will be held, is also significant: It was originally an air force base built in 1940, during World War II. But its role expanded significantly during the Cold War that followed. The US was worried about possible Soviet attacks on Alaska, and thus built monitors and anti-aircraft systems to counter any threats. The airbase was an important part of that mission. The air squadrons based there are still positioned to intercept any Russian aircraft that might seek to enter US airspace.

Still, the US has not clarified why it chose Alaska as the venue for the summit.

What’s on the agenda?

The two leaders will discuss the terms for a possible ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

On the agenda is how such a deal could look, including possible territorial concessions on either side.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Its military currently controls about 19 percent of Ukrainian land across Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson and small parts of Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk provinces.

Ukraine controlled parts of Russia’s Kursk region from August 2024 but has since lost most of the territory.

What land swaps could Trump and Putin discuss?

Trump, on Monday, suggested in a news briefing that Ukraine and Russia could swap territory in order to reach a land deal.

However, he walked back that suggestion on Tuesday at another briefing as his suggestion proved controversial across Europe. Trump promised to get back some Ukrainian territory.

“Russia occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he said.

As part of any swap deal, analysts believe that Putin will press for Ukraine to withdraw from the parts of Donetsk that its troops still control. That would give Russia complete control of the Donbas region, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk – Russia already controls almost all of Luhansk – in addition to Crimea and chunks of Kherson, Zaporizhia and other southern regions. It will also want Ukraine to relinquish the tiny part of Kursk in Russia that Kyiv’s forces occupy.

In exchange, Russia might be willing to give up the small areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions under its control.

Moscow invaded and illegally occupied Crimea in March 2014. Pro-Russian militias seized parts of the Donbas starting from April 2014, triggering conflict with resisting Ukrainian troops. Much of the region was then taken over by invading Russian forces following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What are Trump’s expectations for the summit?

President Trump said on Monday that he expects this meeting to be a “feel-type” conversation between him and Putin, one where he understands what the Russian leader wants.

A second meeting, he has said, is likely going to come from it soon and will include Zelenskyy and Putin, with Trump likely hosting it.

However, Trump sounded a more severe tone on Wednesday. He warned that if the Friday meeting ended without Russia agreeing to peace in Ukraine, there would be “very severe consequences” for Russia.

Trump did not specify what US actions might be. He’d earlier threatened economic sanctions on Russia “within 50 days” if Moscow did not end the war. However, the Alaska meeting was announced as the deadline of August 8 arrived, with no significant action from Washington.

Presently, Russia is under significant Western sanctions, including bans on its banks and its crude oil. In late July, the US slammed India with tariffs for buying Russian oil, and this week, US officials have warned of secondary sanctions on that country if Friday’s talks fail.

What has Russia said it wants from the meeting?

Moscow presented a proposal to the US on August 6, last week, stating its requests, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

Russia’s asks remain similar to its stated goals in June 2024. Moscow says it will stop the war if:

• Kyiv drops its ambitions to join NATO, and if the country disarms significantly.
• If Kyiv pulls back and cedes all of the Donbas in return for Russia halting advances on Kherson and Zaporizhia, and handing back small occupied parts of Sumy and Kharkiv.
• If Western sanctions are relaxed as part of a peace deal.

But Russian officials have since also indicated that they want any movement towards peace to also serve as a launchpad for improved ties with the US. Putin’s delegation for the Alaska summit suggests that Russia might make economic offers – including the promise of investments in the US – to Trump.

What are Ukraine and Europe seeking from the talks?

Zelenkyy has in the past said that Ukraine will not cede territory.

He reiterated that on August 9, in light of Putin’s proposal to Trump, and stated that Ukraine would not “gift land to the occupier” and that it was impossible to do so under Ukrainian law.

Europe, meanwhile, has been nervous about what Trump might agree to. Following the three-way call between Trump, Zelenskyy and European leaders on Wednesday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer outlined what the European coalition wanted:

• That the US not agree to any territorial deals without Ukraine being present
• Ukraine needs credible security guarantees as part of any peace deal, that is, a guarantee of non-invasion by Russia.
• Zelenskyy reiterated those calls and added that Ukraine should still be allowed to join NATO if a ceasefire is reached. He also said sanctions should be strengthened if Russia fails to agree to a peace deal on Friday.

What could the outcome be?

Some analysts are hopeful about the prospects of the beginnings of a peace deal emerging from the summit. The big question, they say, is whether Ukraine will agree to a possible deal between the two leaders in Alaska, if its terms are unplatable to Kyiv.

However, others, like Melvin of RUSI, think this meeting is ultimately a play by Russia to stall the US from making good on its sanctions threat, while allowing Moscow to keep advancing militarily in Ukraine.

“Putin believes that he can win [and] is anxious to stall the United States and any further pressure it may seek to put on Russia,” he said. “The most likely outcome of the summit is then that there may be some announcements of steps forward, but the war will continue.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and United States President Donald Trump will meet on Friday in Alaska to discuss ending Moscow’s three-year-long war in Ukraine.

The leaders are expected to discuss “land swapping”, suggesting that Trump may support an agreement where Russia will maintain control of some of the Ukrainian territory it currently occupies, but not all.

In a news conference at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said, “Russia’s occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”

But the idea of a swap also suggests that Ukraine might need to give up some land that it currently controls.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly said that any deal involving the ceding of Ukrainian land to Russia would be unsuccessful.

What does Putin want?

Last month, Trump warned that tougher sanctions would be put in place unless Russia halted fighting with Ukraine within 50 days. That deadline has now passed, and no new measures have hit Moscow, but the US has imposed 50 percent tariffs on India to punish it for its continued purchase of Russian oil.

Trump has demanded that Putin agree to a ceasefire on Friday to avoid the US imposing further tariffs on other countries buying Russian energy assets.

Putin has stated that he wants full control of Ukraine’s eastern regions, including Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, parts of which Russia annexed in 2022, along with Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

If Kyiv were to agree, it would mean withdrawing troops from parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, where much of the recent fighting has been concentrated.

Bloomberg reported on August 8 that US and Russian officials were working towards an agreement that would “freeze the war”, and allow Moscow to keep the territory it has taken.

In addition, Putin has consistently demanded that Ukraine remain a neutral state, abandoning its ambitions to join NATO.

Can Ukraine even cede territory?

Ukraine giving up land it has lost during this war and previously, in 2014, is not a welcome option.

On Saturday, Zelenskyy said that he would not “gift” land to Russia, and that Ukrainians would not give up their land to Russian occupiers.

More than this, ceding any territory would be illegal under the Ukrainian constitution.

How much of Ukraine does Russia control?

Russia occupies about one-fifth – 114,500 square km (44,600 square miles) – of Ukraine’s land.

The active front line stretches some 1,000km (620 miles) through the regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson.

Russia controls about three-quarters of the Zaporizhia and Kherson regions.

Additionally, small parts of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions of Ukraine are under Russian occupation. Across the Sumy and Kharkiv regions, Russia controls about 400 sq km (154 sq miles) of territory. In Dnipropetrovsk, Russia has taken a tiny area near the border.

Russia controls about 46,570 sq km (17,981 sq miles), or 88 percent, of the territory known as Donbas, made up of the Luhansk and Donbas regions. Russia occupies almost all of Luhansk and three-quarters of Donetsk.

Ukraine still holds about 6,600 sq km (2,550 sq miles) of Donbas, although Russia has been focusing most of its energy along the front in Donetsk, pushing towards the last remaining major cities not in its control.

This has been part of its efforts to secure what is known as the “fortress belt”.

What is the fortress belt?

The “fortress belt” stretches some 50km (31 miles) along a strategic highway between the towns of Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk.

The fortress belt includes key towns — Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, Oleksiyevo-Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka – which have remained under the control of Ukrainian troops since 2014 and are of significant strategic importance as logistical and administrative centre.

Attempts by Russian troops to capture Sloviansk and the cities of the fortress belt in 2022-2023 were unsuccessful, and Ukrainian counteroffensives drove the Russian forces far from key positions.

“Ukraine’s fortress belt has served as a major obstacle to the Kremlin’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine over the last 11 years,” the Washington, DC-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported on August 8.

Russian advances: What’s the situation on the ground now?

In August, Russian forces made significant gains, advancing about 10km (6 miles) beyond the front lines as they intensified efforts to seize the fortress belt from the southwest, concentrating forces in the Toretsk and eastern Pokrovsk directions.

Al Jazeera military expert Alex Gatapoulous said, “I’m not sure what Ukraine has to offer in terms of territory. Russia has it all and is slowly winning this conflict, albeit at a great cost.

“There is already movement around Pokrovsk in the east, and Konstantinivka is also in danger of encirclement. If Ukraine hasn’t built defensive positions in-depth, Russian forces will have the ability to break out into open country. This is a really dangerous time for Ukraine. They’ve lost all the Russian territory they had taken in Kursk and have little to trade with.”

How has the war progressed over the past three years?

In the war’s early weeks, Russia advanced from the north, east and south, rapidly seizing vast areas of Ukrainian territory, with fierce battles in Irpin, Bucha and Mariupol – the latter of which fell to Russian forces in May 2022. The siege of Mariupol was one of the deadliest and most destructive battles of the war. Ukrainian officials estimated tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

By March 2022, Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, and by April of that year, Russia controlled 27 percent of Ukraine.

By late 2022, Ukraine had turned the tide with major counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson, with Kyiv reclaiming 54 percent of the land Russia had captured since the beginning of the war, according to ISW data, reducing Russian-occupied land to just 18 percent of the country.

In August 2024, Ukraine launched a significant incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, marking a notable escalation in the conflict. This offensive saw Ukrainian forces advancing approximately 10km (6 miles) into Russian territory, seizing control over an estimated 250 sq km (96.5 sq miles), all of which has since been retaken by Russia.

By late 2024 and into 2025, the war had settled into a grinding impasse, with both sides suffering heavy losses. However, Russia’s recent incursions, pushing towards Sloviansk, allude to the potential for another offensive to take land it has historically struggled to capture.

What was the pre-war situation?

Prior to Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia had held Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Moscow also supported separatists in the Donbas region, leading to the creation of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Russia officially recognised these entities on February 21, 2022, and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine three days later.

The war in Ukraine has resulted in one of the largest and fastest-growing displacement crises in Europe since World War II. According to the UN, approximately 10 million Ukrainians have been displaced, which is about 21 percent of the country’s pre-war population.

Of these, 3.7 million remain internally displaced within Ukraine, while 6.9 million have fled abroad as refugees.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived on Wednesday in Berlin for a virtual summit with European officials and United States President Donald Trump, convened by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The call was meant to bring European leaders together with Trump before the planned August 15 Alaska meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Those on the call included Merz and the US president, as well as US Vice President JD Vance, Zelenskyy, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, among others.

Here are the key takeaways:

What happened on Wednesday?

The prospect of Trump meeting alone with Putin has left European leaders uneasy. Since the Alaska summit was announced, they have worked to secure Trump’s ear one last time, and on Wednesday, that effort resulted in a series of high-level calls.

About 12:00 GMT, European leaders and NATO members held a video conference with Zelenskyy. Roughly an hour later, Trump and Vice President JD Vance joined the discussion.

Chancellor Merz and President Zelenskyy then delivered joint statements, followed by a separate address from Trump at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Later in the day, the “Coalition of the Willing”, a group of 31 countries committed to strengthening support for Ukraine against Russian aggression, met in a separate virtual session, issuing a statement.

What were the key takeaways from all these talks?

Here is a breakdown.

EU leaders:

Following the talks with other European leaders and Trump:

• Merz said that European and Ukrainian security interests must be respected at Friday’s Alaska summit. He underlined the importance of Ukraine having a seat at the table in any peace discussions, with a ceasefire as the essential first step.
• “We have made it clear that Ukraine will be at the table as soon as there is a follow-up meeting,” Merz told reporters in Berlin alongside Zelenskyy. “President Trump wants to make a ceasefire a priority,” he added.
• Any territorial exchange in Ukraine “must only be discussed with Ukraine”, French President Macron told reporters in Bregancon, France, following the call.
• “Trump was very clear on the fact that the US wants to obtain a ceasefire at this meeting in Alaska,” Macron said.  “We must continue to support Ukraine, and when I say ‘we’, I mean Europeans and Americans,” he added.

• Ukraine needs credible security guarantees as part of any peace deal, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Starmer said following the virtual summit. The United Kingdom’s support for Ukraine is “unwavering”, he added.

Zelenskyy statements:

• Zelenskyy, during the news conference with Merz, said Putin is “bluffing” about being interested in peace. “Russia is attempting to portray itself as capable of occupying all of Ukraine. That is undoubtedly what they want,” Zelenskyy said.
• The Ukrainian leader also warned that “talks about us, without us, will not work”.
• “Everything concerning Ukraine must be discussed exclusively with Ukraine. We must prepare a trilateral format for talks. There must be a ceasefire,” Zelenskyy added.
• He also said “there must be security guarantees – truly reliable ones”.
• Among the agreed principles, Zelenskyy said, is that Russia must not be allowed to block Ukraine’s path to joining the European Union or NATO, and that peace talks should go hand in hand with maintaining pressure on Russia.

• The Ukrainian leader also emphasised that sanctions should be strengthened if Russia fails to agree to a ceasefire during the Alaska summit. “These are effective principles. It is important that they work,” Zelenskyy added.

Thank you for your support! https://t.co/8GyunlWhwf

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 13, 2025

Trump’s news conference:

Following the call, Trump spoke at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC:

• “We had a very good call. I would rate it a 10, very friendly,” Trump explained. The US leader then went on to discuss potential next steps ahead of Friday’s meeting.
• “There’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a second meeting, which will be more productive than the first. Because the first is: I’m going to find out where we are and what we’re doing,” he said.
• Trump also mentioned the possibility of a later meeting “between President Putin and President Zelenskyy and myself, if they’d like to have me there”, after the first meeting between him and Putin.
• Trump also said he plans to call Zelenskyy and other European leaders after Friday’s discussions with Putin.
• The US president also said there will be “very severe consequences” for Russia if Putin doesn’t agree to end the war after Friday’s meeting.

• “Do you believe you can convince him to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine?” one journalist asked Trump. “I’ve had that conversation with him,” Trump said.
• “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street. So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation,” he added.
• However, he reaffirmed his intention to find a solution: “I want to end the war. It’s Biden’s war, but I want to end it. I’ll be very proud to end this war, along with the five other wars I ended,” he said, without explaining which other conflicts he was referring to. He has claimed credit for ceasefires between India and Pakistan in May and Israel and Iran in June, and helped mediate truce pacts between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Trump has also repeatedly made it clear that he covets a Nobel Peace Prize and believes he is deserving of one.

The Coalition of the Willing:

The coalition issued a statement outlining four key requirements they believe should form the basis of Friday’s talks.

• They said “meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a ceasefire or a lasting and significant cessation of hostilities”.
• Second, if Russia refuses a ceasefire in Alaska, sanctions and other economic measures should be intensified to further strain its war economy.
• Third, “international borders must not be changed by force”.
• Fourth, Ukraine should receive strong security guarantees, with the Coalition of the Willing ready to help, including a reassurance force after hostilities end. “No limitations should be placed on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries,” the statement said. And Russia cannot veto Ukraine’s path to EU or NATO membership.

Will the European intervention influence the Alaska summit?

It’s unclear, but analysts say that Wednesday’s calls show how Europe has managed to make sure that Trump can’t ignore the continent.

“Even if certain commitments are given, we don’t know what will happen once Putin and Trump find themselves in a room,” Lucian Kim, a senior analyst for Ukraine with the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.

“The Europeans have quite a lot of power and even more than they realise themselves,” he said, adding that it was an “achievement” for European leaders to get Trump’s attention, and there is now a difference in tone.

“It was not a given when Trump first got into office that he would listen to the Europeans,” he said. Kim also noted that Europe has used its power and influence to pressure Russia over the war.

“Russia was heavily dependent on Europe, not the United States, and this lack of trade is hurting Russia,” he said. “Also, you have European banks that are holding hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian government assets.”

“Trump has realised that without the Europeans, it will be very hard to reach any solution in Ukraine.”

What has Russia said so far about any peace agreement?

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexey Fadeev told a news conference that Moscow’s position remained unchanged since President Putin outlined it in June 2024.

At the time, Putin had said that a ceasefire would take effect immediately if the Ukrainian government withdrew from four Ukrainian regions partially occupied by Russia – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. He also insisted that Ukraine must formally abandon its bid to join the NATO military alliance.

Russia currently controls about 19 percent of Ukraine, including the entirety of Crimea and Luhansk, more than 70 percent of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, as well as small portions of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Russia says both sides affirm intention for Putin-Trump meet in Alaska on Friday, where Ukraine war set to be discussed.

The top diplomats from Russia and the United States have held a phone call ahead of a planned meeting this week between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In a post on Telegram on Tuesday, the ministry said Sergei Lavrov said the two sides had reaffirmed their intention to hold successful talks. The US Department of State did not immediately confirm the talks.

But speaking shortly after the announcement, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt revealed that Trump would meet with Putin in the city of Anchorage. She said the pair would discuss ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“On Friday morning, Trump will travel across the country to Anchorage, Alaska for a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Leavitt told reporters.

She added that Trump “is determined to try and end this war and stop the killing”.

On Monday, Trump told reporters he was “going to see” what Putin “has in mind” when it comes to a deal to end the fighting.

Trump also said he and Putin would discuss “land swapping”, indicating he may support an agreement that sees Russia maintain control of at least some of the Ukrainian territory it occupies.

Kyiv has repeatedly said that any deal that would see it cede occupied land – including Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia – to Russia would be a non-starter.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Putin wants Ukraine to withdraw from the remaining 30 percent of the Donetsk region that Ukraine controls as part of a ceasefire deal, saying the position had been conveyed to him by a US official.

He reiterated Ukraine would not withdraw from the territories it controls, noting that such a move would go against the country’s constitution and would serve only as a springboard for a future Russian invasion.

Moscow has maintained that any deal must require Ukraine to relinquish some of the territories Russia has seized since 2014. He has also called for a pause to Western aid for Ukraine and an end to Kyiv’s efforts to join the NATO military alliance.

Friday’s planned meeting will be the first time Putin has been in the US since 2015, when he attended the UN General Assembly.

The pair met six times during Trump’s first presidency, including a 2018 summit in Helsinki, during which Trump sided with Putin – and undermined the US intelligence community – by saying Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election.

Published on
12/08/2025 – 15:34 GMT+2

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Russian markets are reacting positively to the upcoming visit by President Vladimir Putin to the United States — his first since 2015 — with the MOEX Russia Index climbing above 2,950 points, its highest level since late April.

The index initially rose last Wednesday as Putin met with Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow. It then began to climb again as the location of the Trump-Putin summit was announced on Friday.

On Tuesday at around 15.15 CEST, the MOEX was trading at 2,959.63, a bump of 1.2% compared to its close at around 2,924.63 on Friday.

Investors are hopeful about a diplomatic breakthrough at the upcoming Trump–Putin meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, likely counting on an easing of sanctions or new trade channels being unlocked.

The jump was buoyed by Russian energy giants, with Gazprom shares climbing 3.65% and Novatek surged 5.44%, according to the Moscow Times.

Geopolitical buzz

Geopolitical buzz can swing markets as investors are encouraged by the possibility of conflict resolution or escalation.

Just the prospect of high-level talks can trigger climbs in sectors tied to trade, energy or infrastructure.

However, uncertainty or lack of results can just as quickly reverse the gains, which could happen if the much-anticipated summit does not produce any tangible results — something that is likely due to the fact that European powers are so far not involved in the talks between Trump and Putin.

It also remains unclear how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be incorporated in the talks, as he and European powers insist there can be no lasting deal without Kyiv agreeing to it as well.

Before the 2022 sanctions caused by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the MOEX Russia Index was trading near record highs above 3,800 points in late 2021, backed by strong oil prices and post-pandemic recovery momentum.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Taras, a seasoned Ukrainian serviceman recovering from a contusion, expects “no miracles” from United States President Donald Trump’s August 15 summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

“There’s going to be no miracles, no peace deal in a week, and Putin will try to make Trump believe that it is Ukraine that doesn’t want peace,” the fair-haired 32-year-old with a deep brown tan acquired in the trenches of eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.

Taras, who spent more than three years on the front line and said he had recently shot down an explosives-laden Russian drone barging at him in a field covered with explosion craters, withheld his last name in accordance with the wartime protocol.

Putin wants to dupe Trump by pandering to the US president’s self-image as a peacemaker to avoid further economic sanctions, while the Russian leader seeks a major military breakthrough in eastern Ukraine, Taras said.

“Putin really believes that until this winter, he will seize something sizeable, or that [his troops] will break through the front line and will dictate terms to Ukraine,” Taras said.

As the Trump administration trumpets the upcoming Alaska summit as a major step towards securing a ceasefire, Ukrainians — civilians and military personnel — and experts are largely pessimistic about the outcomes of the meeting between the US and Russian presidents.

This is partly because of the facts on the ground in eastern Ukraine. Earlier this month, Russia intensified its push to seize key locations in the southeastern Donetsk region, ordering thousands of servicemen to conduct nearly-suicidal missions to infiltrate Ukrainian positions, guarded 24/7 by buzzing drones with night and thermal vision.

In the past three months, Russian forces have occupied some 1,500sq km (580 square miles), mostly in Donetsk, of which Russia controls about three-fourths, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates based on geolocated photos and videos.

The pace is slightly faster than in the past three years.

Within weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Russia controlled some 27 percent of Ukrainian territory. But Kyiv’s daring counteroffensive and Moscow’s inability to hold onto areas around the capital and in Ukraine’s north resulted in the loss of 9 percent of occupied lands by the fall of 2022.

Russia has since re-occupied less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory, despite losing hundreds of thousands of servicemen, while pummelling Ukrainian cities almost daily with swarms of drones and missiles. Russia’s push to occupy a “buffer zone” in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region failed as Kyiv’s forces regained most of the occupied ground.

Ukraine also controls a tiny border area in Russia’s western Kursk region, where it started a successful offensive in August 2024, but lost most of its gains earlier this year.

The scepticism in Ukraine over the Alaska meeting is also driven by reports of what the US might offer Putin to try to convince him to stop fighting.

Reports — not denied by Washington — suggest that Trump might offer Moscow full control of Donetsk and the smaller neighbouring Luhansk region. In exchange, Moscow could offer a ceasefire and the freezing of the front line in other Ukrainian regions, as well as the retreat from tiny toeholds in Sumy and the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to the reports.

But to give up Donetsk, Kyiv would have to vacate a “fortress belt” that stretches some 50km (31 miles) along a strategic highway between the towns of Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk.

Donetsk’s surrender would “position Russian forces extremely well to renew their attacks on much more favorable terms, having avoided a long and bloody struggle for the ground,” the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said on Friday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine will not “gift” its land, and that it needs firm security guarantees from the West.

“We don’t need a pause in killings, but a real, long peace. Not a ceasefire some time in the future, in months, but now,” he said in a televised address on Saturday.

Some civilian Ukrainians hold a gloomy view on the prospects of peace, believing that Kyiv’s tilt towards democracy and presumed eventual membership in the European Union, and Moscow’s “imperialistic nature” set up an equation that prevents a sustainable diplomatic solution.

“The war will go on until [either] Ukraine or Russia exist,” Iryna Kvasnevska, a biology teacher in Kyiv whose first cousin was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2023, told Al Jazeera.

But the lack of trust in the Alaska summit for many Ukrainians also stems from a deep lack of faith in Trump himself.

Despite Trump’s recent change in rhetoric and growing public dissatisfaction with Moscow’s reluctance to end the hostilities, the US president has a history of blaming Ukraine – for the war and its demands of its allies – while some of his negotiators have repeated Moscow’s talking points. It is also unclear whether Zelenskyy will be invited to a trilateral meet with Trump and Putin in Alaska, or whether the US will go ahead and seek to shape the future of Ukraine without Kyiv in the room.

“Trump has let us down several times, and the people who believe he won’t do it again are very naive, if not stupid,” Leonid Cherkasin, a retired colonel from the Black Sea port of Odesa who fought pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk in 2014-2015 and suffered contusions, shrapnel and bullet wounds, told Al Jazeera.

“He did threaten Putin a lot in recent weeks, but his actions don’t follow his words,” he said.

He referred to Trump’s pledges during his re-election campaign to “end the war in 24 hours”, and his ultimatums to impose crippling sanctions on Russia if Putin does not show progress in a peace settlement.

Trump’s ultimatum to Putin, initially 50 days long, was reduced to “10 to 12 days” and ended on Friday, one day after the Alaska summit was announced.

Military analysts agree that Putin will not bow to Trump’s and Zelenskyy’s demands.

Meanwhile, the very fact of a face-to-face with Trump heralds a diplomatic victory for Putin, who has become a political pariah in the West and faces child abduction charges that have led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant against him. Putin last visited the US for bilateral meetings in 2007, only coming for UN summits after that, but not visiting the country since the warrant was issued.

“What’s paramount for Putin is the fact of his conversation with Trump as equals,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

“I think the deal will be limited to an agreement on cessation of air strikes, and Putin will get three months to finalise the land operations – that is, to seize the [entire] Donetsk region.”

An air ceasefire may benefit Russia, as it can amass thousands of drones and hundreds of missiles for future attacks. The ceasefire will also stop Ukraine’s increasingly successful drone strikes on military sites, ammunition depots, airfields and oil refineries in Russia or occupied Ukrainian regions.

“Then [Putin] will, of course, fool Trump, and everything will resume,” Mitrokhin said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has staunchly rejected a suggestion by Donald Trump that ‘swapping territory’ could be a way to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. European leaders have reiterated their support for Kyiv ahead of planned talks between the US President and Russia’s Putin.

With US and Russian leaders set to meet in Alaska next week, Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskyy warns deals without his country will not bring peace.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out Ukraine ceding land to Russia and demanded his country take part in negotiations in comments made before planned talks between the leaders of Russia and the United States.

In a video shared on social media on Saturday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready for “real decisions” that could bring a “dignified peace” but stressed there could be no violation of the constitution on territorial issues.

“Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” he said, warning that “decisions without Ukraine” would not bring peace.

“They will not achieve anything. These are stillborn decisions. They are unworkable decisions. And we all need real and genuine peace. Peace that people will respect,” added Zelenskyy, whose country has been fighting off a full-scale Russian invasion since February 2022.

His comments came hours after US President Donald Trump said a peace deal would involve “some swapping of territories” as he announced a meeting on Friday with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the US state of Alaska to discuss the war in Ukraine.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, which also forced millions of people to flee their homes.

Three rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine this year have failed to bear fruit, and it remains unclear whether a summit would bring peace any closer.

On Thursday, Putin said he considers a meeting with Zelenskyy possible but the conditions for such negotiations must be right and the prerequisites for this are still far from being met.

The Russian president did not outline his conditions, but previously, the Kremlin has insisted that Ukraine give up the territories Russia occupies, Western nations stop supplying Ukraine with weapons and they exclude Ukraine from membership in the NATO military alliance.

“There has been a lot of speculation over what a ceasefire agreement could look like in which the lines of contact between Russia and Ukraine could be frozen for a number of years,” Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javad, reporting from Moscow, said.

“It is also not clear whether the Russian demand that NATO’s ambitions in Ukraine should be forever quashed is actually going to be met.”

‘A challenging process’

Ukraine and its European allies have long opposed any agreement that involves ceding occupied territory, but Putin has repeatedly said any deal must require Ukraine to relinquish some of the territories Russia has seized.

Russia declared four Ukrainian regions that it does not fully control – Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Luhansk – its territory in 2022 and also claims the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said the talks between the presidents of Russia and the US next week will “focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis”.

“This will evidently be a challenging process, but we will engage in it actively and energetically,” Ushakov said.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland, a close ally of Ukraine, said on Friday that a pause in the conflict could be close.

“There are certain signals, and we also have an intuition that perhaps a freeze in the conflict – I don’t want to say the end, but a freeze in the conflict – is closer than it is further away,” Tusk said at a news conference after talks with Zelenskyy. “There are hopes for this.”

The Alaska summit would be the first between sitting US and Russian presidents since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021.

Trump and Putin last sat together in 2019 at a Group of 20 summit in Japan during Trump’s first term. They have spoken by telephone several times since Trump returned to the White House in January.