US President Donald Trump called on his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Russia’s terms for ending the war in Ukraine.
According to the Financial Times, at a meeting in the White House on Friday, Trump warned Zelensky that President Vladimir Putin had threatened to “destroy” Ukraine if it did not comply with the terms.
During the meeting, Trump insisted that Zelensky surrender the entire Donbas to Russia, repeatedly repeating the points that the Russian president had presented in their conversation a day earlier, the Financial Times stated, citing people familiar with the conversation.
Ukraine eventually managed to convince Trump to support freezing the current front lines, the FT reports.
After the meeting, Trump said that the two sides should stop the war on the front line.
The White House did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the Financial Times report.
Zelensky arrived at the White House on Friday seeking weapons to continue the fight, but met with the American president who seemed more interested in brokering a peace deal, Reuters writes.
In a conversation with Trump on Thursday, Putin offered some small areas of the two southern regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, in exchange for much larger parts of the Donbas that are currently under Ukrainian control, the Financial Times report adds.
That is less than his original request from 2024 for Kyiv to cede the entire Donbas plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, an area of almost 20,000 square kilometers.
Zelensky’s spokesperson has not yet responded to a Reuters inquiry as to whether Trump pressured Zelensky to accept peace on Russian terms.
Trump and Putin agreed on Thursday to hold a second summit on the war in Ukraine in the next two weeks, possibly in Budapest, following the August 15 meeting in Alaska which yielded no progress.
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Source: Nova.rs; Photo: EPA/AARON SCHWARTZ / POOL