U.S. President Donald Trump said late Sunday the war in Ukraine should be frozen along the current front lines, days after a reportedly tense meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said he and Zelenskyy “never discussed” ceding the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east entirely to Russia, denying media reports about the meeting.
“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle line,” Trump said.
While open-source maps of the conflict show that Russian forces have occupied most of the Donbas, Ukrainian troops maintain hard-fought, heavily fortified defenses in the rest of the region, which Kyiv is loathe to abandon over fears it paves the way for Vladimir Putin to further invade the country.
“Let it be cut the way it is, it’s cut up right now,” Trump added about the Donbas. “I think 78 percent of the land is already taken by Russia. You leave it the way it is right now, they can negotiate something later on down the line.”
During the talks with Zelenskyy in Washington, a person familiar with the matter told POLITICO that Trump initially suggested Kyiv should give up territory to Moscow to end the war, adding the “Americans said that Putin wants to keep fighting, and he has a strong war machine.”
But Trump ultimately ended the meeting by saying: ‘OK, let’s try to end this on the current line,’” the person said.
Friday’s Trump-Zelenskyy summit came a day after the American president announced he’d spoken by phone with Putin and the two had agreed to restart peace talks with a meeting in Budapest. That prompted fear among Ukrainian and European officials that the American leader was again being swayed by Kremlin talking points.
Another account of Friday’s meeting with Zelenskyy, published in the Financial Times, reported that Trump told the Ukrainian he could either accept Putin’s terms for peace or be “destroyed” by Russia — and that the conversation devolved into a shouting match.
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