European leaders said on Wednesday that they had hammered out a strategy with President Trump for his scheduled meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, including an insistence that any peace plan must start with a cease-fire and not be negotiated without Ukraine at the table.
The trans-Atlantic discussions on Wednesday were a last-minute effort by European leaders to close ranks with Mr. Trump ahead of the Friday meeting. They came in a video call arranged by Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. It included Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and several other European leaders with strong relationships with Mr. Trump, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy.
Mr. Zelensky traveled to Berlin for the meeting and briefed reporters afterward with Mr. Merz.
“We had a truly exceptionally constructive and good conversation” with the president, Mr. Merz told reporters in brief remarks. “There is hope for movement, there is hope for peace in Ukraine,” he added.
Mr. Trump is famously mercurial, including on the issue of Ukraine. At several points in recent weeks, his European allies have believed they were succeeding in bringing him onboard with their strategies — only for him to warm to Mr. Putin’s overtures, as he did in agreeing to the hastily scheduled bilateral meeting.
After the meeting, though, Mr. Trump sounded pleased with his allies. “We had a very good call,” he told reporters after an event at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “I would rate it a 10. Very friendly.”
Mr. Trump said he would call Mr. Zelensky, then European leaders, after the Alaska meeting. If that meeting goes well, he said, he would like to meet soon after with Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky together.
He said “there will be very severe consequences” for Russia if Mr. Putin does not agree to stop the war after the Friday meeting. Asked if he believed he could convince Mr. Putin on Friday to stop targeting Ukrainian civilians, Mr. Trump said no.
“I’ve had that conversation with him,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him, and then I go home and see a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the streets.”
Both Mr. Merz and Mr. Zelensky told reporters that Mr. Trump had agreed to five principles for the talks with Mr. Putin. They include keeping Ukraine “at the table” for follow-up meetings on the war and refusing to discuss peace terms, like swaps of land between Russia and Ukraine, before a cease-fire is put in place.
They said that Ukraine would be willing to discuss changes in territory — including ceding some land to Russia — but that it would not discuss legally recognizing Russia’s occupation of parts of the country.
The principles also include insisting on security guarantees for Ukraine after the war — including retaining its right to potentially join NATO in the future — and a commitment to ramping up economic pressure on Russia if negotiations do not lead to an agreement.
Mr. Trump said he supported Ukraine’s push for security guarantees and that any land swaps would be Ukraine’s decision to make, not his, according to an official who witnessed the exchange and to António Costa, the president of the European Council, who participated in the call.
“Several messages emerged from the exchange,” Mr. Costa told reporters, including “the territorial questions which concern Ukraine cannot be negotiated — will only be negotiated by the Ukrainian president,” and that a link “must continue to exist between any territorial concession and the security guarantees that will be provided to Ukraine.”
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump had suggested to reporters at the White House that he might negotiate land swaps with Mr. Putin.
Mr. Zelensky said on Wednesday that he had warned Mr. Trump that Mr. Putin was bluffing about his intentions in Anchorage.
“I told my colleagues, the American president, our colleague Putin does not want peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “He wants to occupy us completely.”
Mr. Trump had posted on social media earlier on Wednesday that he was about to meet with European leaders. “They are great people who want to see a deal done,” he said. He and White House officials did not immediately comment after the meeting, though Mr. Trump posted a complaint about media coverage of the meeting with Mr. Putin.
“If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!” he wrote.
The virtual meeting was the latest attempt by Mr. Merz and his European counterparts to head off Mr. Trump’s unilateral impulses and to keep him from falling under Mr. Putin’s sway — though Mr. Merz and his allies almost never frame it that way.
Mr. Merz has staked much of his early term on rebuilding Germany’s military and reclaiming its leadership position for Europe and the world, with a firm gaze toward Russia. He has courted Mr. Trump aggressively since taking office in early May.
He has relentlessly pitched Mr. Trump on the idea that by intervening boldly and decisively on the side of Ukraine against Russia, the United States could force Mr. Putin into a cease-fire and serious talks on ending the war. It has been the chancellor’s primary request of the president, overwhelming other major issues, like Mr. Trump’s push to impose new tariffs on Europe.
Mr. Trump seemed receptive, to varying degrees, particularly as he grew frustrated in recent months with Mr. Putin’s continued bombardments of Ukraine. He agreed to sell American weapons to Germany and others, to then be supplied to Kyiv, and he has threatened harsh economic penalties on Moscow if the war continues.
But then, last week, after overtures from Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump shifted again. He hastily scheduled the Alaska meeting. This week, he told reporters he wanted to see what Mr. Putin had on his mind, and whether he could broker “a deal” on the war.
Mr. Merz and his allies fear what that discussion could bring. So they stacked the video call with top Europeans who enjoy good relations with Mr. Trump, including the leaders of Poland and Finland and NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte.
European leaders worry that peace on bad terms could encourage Mr. Putin to continue his push toward Western Europe, perhaps sending troops next to a neighbor like Lithuania, a member of NATO.
“It really is a concern that Putin might feel emboldened,” said Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper. “Not to go for Berlin, of course, but to cause some unrest in other Baltic countries, other European countries.”
Above all, Europeans fear that Mr. Putin could use the meeting to sell Mr. Trump on a peace deal that Mr. Zelensky would never accept, leading Mr. Trump to turn his ire on the Ukrainian leader.
Mr. Trump could then threaten to pull crucial American intelligence support for Ukraine on the battlefield, as his administration briefly did this spring.
Europe would continue to back Ukraine in that case, but its task would be more difficult. Mr. Merz and other leaders have acknowledged the need for American support. Ms. Sauerbrey said that reality puts European leaders in a “very weak position” with Mr. Trump.
“They can hope and pray” and continue to flatter him, she said. “But that’s pretty much all they have.”
Kim Barker and Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine. Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin. Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from Brussels.
Jim Tankersley is the Berlin bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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