President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Sunday called for a “lasting” peace to end the war there, and warned that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had previously seized Ukrainian land as “a springboard for a new attack.”
Mr. Zelensky made the comments on social media after he arrived in Washington ahead of planned high-stakes meetings at the White House on Monday with President Trump and several European leaders.
Mr. Trump met Mr. Putin in Alaska on Friday for talks on Ukraine that ended without the cease-fire Mr. Trump had been insisting was necessary to secure a peace deal. Instead, he backed Mr. Putin’s plan for a sweeping peace agreement based on Ukraine ceding territory it controls to Russia.
Russia already occupies almost a fifth of Ukraine, including the entire Crimean Peninsula and large portions of an eastern region known as the Donbas. Mr. Trump told European leaders after his Alaska meeting that a peace deal could be struck quickly if Mr. Zelensky agreed to give up the rest of the Donbas.
In his comments on Sunday, Mr. Zelensky appeared to subtly push back against that idea — not directly, but by describing Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine as a cautionary tale.
“We all share a strong desire to end this war quickly and reliably,” he wrote. “And peace must be lasting. Not like it was years ago, when Ukraine was forced to give up Crimea and part of our East — part of Donbas — and Putin simply used it as a springboard for a new attack.”
Mr. Zelensky said the “so called” security guarantees that Ukraine received from Russia, the United States and Britain under a 1994 accord — in exchange for giving old Soviet nuclear weapons back to Russia — also had not worked.
“Of course, Crimea should not have been given up then, just as Ukrainians did not give up Kyiv, Odesa, or Kharkiv after 2022,” he wrote, referring to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that year.
Mr. Zelensky will meet Mr. Trump at the White House early Monday afternoon. Later in the day, they will be joined by the leaders of France, Germany, Britain and Italy, as well as the secretary general of NATO and the president of the European Union’s executive arm.
Mr. Trump’s recent reversal on a critical negotiating point for Ukraine and Europe — obtaining a cease-fire before negotiating land or security guarantees — has left many European officials wondering whether Mr. Trump was swayed by Mr. Putin in Alaska.
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world.
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