KYIV — Ukraine’s nightmare is that U.S. President Donald Trump will use Friday’s summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to style himself as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize by forcing through a war settlement that sells out Kyiv.
That’s why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and key European allies will use a pre-summit meeting with Trump on Wednesday to map out red lines they hope will deter Putin from using an accord with Trump as an opportunity to regroup and press on with his core objective — not the seizure of a bit of eastern Ukraine but rather the destruction of an independent, democratic Ukrainian state.
“We understand the Russians’ intention to try to deceive America — we will not allow this,” Zelenskyy said earlier this week.
In addition to what promise to be bitter debates over the continued illegal occupation of Ukrainian land by Russian forces, Kyiv will want to ensure that Moscow pays for the hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of destruction it has wreaked and returns 20,000 abducted children, along with prisoners of war.
Chiefly, Ukraine wants a deal that has meaningful security guarantees and doesn’t simply allow Trump and Putin to team up on reintegrating Russia into the global economy. That would only allow Putin to strengthen Russia for renewed offensives.
The mood is Kyiv is skeptical about what will emerge from Alaska.
“I don’t expect any breakthrough from this summit. Putin did not abandon his ultimate goal to destroy Ukraine. He can only agree to a ceasefire that will create the conditions for our destruction,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, head of the foreign relations committee in the Ukrainian parliament.
“In the case of Trump and his diplomacy, it’s all for the sake of the picture … A spectacle for the media, like the meeting with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un. But for Putin, this meeting means a lot, as it shows him as the leader of a great state with its political interests, not an international pariah he should have been, as he has not abandoned his desire to destroy Ukraine’s statehood,” Merezhko added.
If there is to be peace, Russia has to back down, Zelenskyy stressed in a Telegram post.
“This war must be brought to an end — and Russia must end it,” he said, adding that any move to end the fighting must include Ukraine. “Any decisions that are against us, any decisions that are without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace.”
Here are Ukraine’s core strategic interests that it wants defended in any talks with Russia:
Durable ceasefire before any territory swaps
During his 2022 speech announcing the invasion of Ukraine, Putin said one of his key goals was to “liberate Donbas from the Kyiv regime” — as well as to “demilitarize and denazify” the country. The American side is floating the idea that Ukraine should give up the eastern territory of Donbas in exchange for Putin stopping his troops from further occupation of southern Ukraine.
Trump himself is suggesting that peace requires “land swapping.”
Ukraine’s stance is that it will not make any concession over its borders as guaranteed by international law and its own constitution.
“We support what President Trump wanted — a ceasefire, and then sit down at the negotiating table and talk about everything else,” Zelenskyy told reporters on Tuesday.
He underlined, however, that his country won’t retreat from the front lines.
“We will not leave Donbas. We cannot do this,” Zelenskyy said. “Donbas for the Russians is a springboard for a future new offensive. If we leave Donbas of our own free will or if we are pressured, we will open a third war.”
“If today we leave Donbas, from our fortifications, from our reliefs, from the heights that we control, we will clearly open a bridgehead for preparing an offensive by the Russians. In a few years, Putin will have an open path to both the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro regions. And not only that. Also to Kharkiv.”
“[Putin] doesn’t want the occupation of our state from the point of view of territory. He doesn’t want a sovereign Ukraine to exist. And that’s the whole endgame,” he added.
If Kyiv does ultimately have to make some compromise as part of final deal based on the realities on the battlefield, it will then only talk about the territorial matters after Russia agrees to and sticks to a ceasefire, a person familiar with the matter told POLITICO on condition of anonymity.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is suggesting that the final compromise will be that certain territories will have to be Russian by dint of military occupation, but legally still Ukrainian.
“When it comes to this whole issue of territory, when it comes to acknowledging, for example, maybe in a future deal that Russia is controlling de facto, factually some of the territory of Ukraine, it has to be effectual recognition, and not a political de jure recognition,” he told ABC on Sunday.
That was denounced by some as a sell-out to Russian imperialism.
Former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis called the NATO’s chief’s conditions “sickening.”
“Rutte is revealing that the latest genius 5D chess move to save Ukraine is to casually throw millions of people into a black hole of oppression, torture, rape, kidnapping, murder and destruction of national identity — ‘de facto, but not de jure,’” he said.
Such decisions could be politically lethal for Zelenskyy’s administration. A change in borders would need constitutional approval — which would be very difficult to obtain — would enrage a population that has sacrificed blood and treasure to hold off Russia, and could see hundreds of thousands of people displaced from territory handed over to Russia.
“Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post.
As well, the parts of Dontesk still under Ukrainian control contain formidable defenses — handing them over could weaken Ukraine’s ability to fend off a future Russian attack.
“If today we leave Donbas, from our fortifications, from our reliefs, from the heights that we control, we will clearly open a bridgehead for preparing an offensive by the Russians,” Zelenskyy said.
Russia has to pay up
The destruction wrought upon Ukraine in human and material terms is immense. Estimates range from $500 billion through to $1 trillion.
Ukraine is adamant that Moscow must pay for its crimes and has some leverage in that a hefty chunk of Russia’s assets are held by close European allies. Almost €200 billion are in Belgium.
“Russia must pay for the approximately €500 billion in damages caused. Until this happens, Moscow must not be granted access to its frozen assets,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at the Ukraine Recovery conference last month.
Security guarantees
Ukraine sees membership in NATO and European Union as the only long-term way of stopping another Russian attack.
“Will we be in NATO? In the EU? I haven’t heard anything — simply not a single proposal that would guarantee that a new war won’t start tomorrow,” Zelenskyy said. “We need security guarantees that will preserve, first of all, our state, a sovereign state, our independence.”
However, Trump has ruled out NATO membership (quietly backed by a few other skeptical member countries) and Moscow wants a categorical alliance commitment to never admit Ukraine. Zelenskyy also complains that Kyiv is being constantly blocked on its way into the European Union by capitals skittish about the economic impact of a large and poor country with an enormous farming sector joining the bloc.
Ukraine also brushes off Moscow’s demands to slice its 900,000-strong active military — the largest in Europe next to Russia — and that Ukraine’s allies stop sending it weapons.
European partners financing the needs of Ukrainian troops and buying weapons from Kyiv, including from the United States, represent the only security guarantee Kyiv has so far. The U.S. is offering nothing but mediation in the war, hinting it might eventually abandon that role too.
The balance has already shifted toward Europe as Trump pulls back on military support for Ukraine. From the start of the war, Europe has given at least €73.9 billion in military aid, while the U.S. has given €64 billion — and new American commitments have flatlined under Trump, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker.
Children and POWs must come home
Almost 20,000 Ukrainian kids were taken by Russia. Ukraine has so far managed to return 1,453 with the mediation of Qatar and other countries.
Moscow claims it’s transferring Ukrainians to safety from the conflict, yet refuses to return the children to their relatives, putting them into the adoption system as orphans instead and immersing them in Russian propaganda. Recently, the Trump administration made it even harder to track and retrieve Ukrainian children in Russia after it disbanded Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab task force, which helped to locate kidnapped children and expose complicit Russian and Belarusian officials.
U.S. cuts to foreign assistance and Trump administration sanctions against the International Criminal Court are also hurting the ability of groups to track thousands of abducted Ukrainian children, a senior European official told POLITICO last month.
In 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes of unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The exchange of POWs is going better — becoming a rare Trump-brokered success. Since the start of his mediation efforts, the two sides have exchanged more than 2,000 prisoners, but thousands remain in captivity, with Russia not even letting international human rights watchdogs visit all of the places where it holds Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.
Trump mustn’t save Russia
Russia is feeling pain from the war it started. It has lost over a million troops killed and wounded so far and its economy has finally started feeling the impact of Western sanctions. Timothy Ash, an analyst who tracks Ukraine, estimated that the war has so far cost Russia about $2 trillion, close to its annual economic output.
Kyiv and its European allies want that pressure maintained, warning that lifting primary and secondary sanctions and allowing the resumption of trade would give Moscow time to regroup for another attack to complete its conquest of Ukraine. They also will try to convince Trump that the threat of more U.S. sanctions will force Putin to negotiate more seriously.
“The most dangerous scenario for us is the possible lifting of U.S. sanctions and the resumption of trade with Russia. This requires our tacit consent or legitimization, which should never be allowed,” Illya Neskhodovskyi, head of the analytical department of the ANTS National Interest Protection Network think tank, said in a post on Facebook.
“Our task is to prevent Trump or anyone else from having a chance to save Russia. We need to maintain and strengthen sanctions, as well as strike at the enemy’s industrial, energy, and logistics facilities. This destroys its production potential and further undermines the economy.”
For Kyiv, the stakes of the Alaska talks are existential.
“The reality here is that Ukraine could survive the war, but not survive the peace,” warned Ash. “The peace could be so bad, that it could strain the very social, economic, and political fabric of the country resulting in effective state failure.”
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