Trump meets with Zelenskyy, Ukraine allies after Putin summit

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Aug 18, 2025

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President Donald Trump Monday held a crucial meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a united front of European leaders at which he agreed to consider providing security guarantees to any peace deal after his controversial Alaska summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

With Trump adopting Russian points that Ukraine should cede land for a peace deal, Zelenskyy and the Europeans talked up the American commitment to participate alongside European allies in providing unspecified security guarantees for any peace deal with Putin.

They also pushed to get Trump back on board with his own previous agreement with Western allies that a ceasefire is needed before any negotiations.

Trump diplomatically told Zelenskyy he is searching for a path to peace after warmly greeting Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.

“The war is going to end,” he said. “The whole world is tired of it…and we all want it to end.”

He politely chatted with Zelenskyy, who wore a formal all-black military-style suit outfit and kept his cool, in a stark contrast to their angry blow up in February.

Trump refused to rule out the possibility of Western or even American peacekeepers on the ground to enforce a possible peace deal.

He held out the possibility of a three-way meeting with Putin in coming days, and said he planned to update the Kremlin strongman after the talks were done.

“We depend on the help of big countries like the United States,” Zelenskyy said.

The high-powered delegation of European leaders, including the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, jetted into Washington and paraded to the White House in hopes of pulling Trump back into the fold after he suggested Ukraine could stop the war anytime by agreeing to Russia’s demands.

“I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told Trump, a plea that other leaders echoed. “So let’s work on that.”

But Trump responded by claiming that he has brokered other peace deals without ceasefires.

Zelenskyy and the European allies appeared to have succeeded in avoiding a repeat of the ugly clash at the White House in February when an angry Trump effectively branded him as the main obstacle to peace.

Since then, Trump shifted to demanding that both Russia and Ukraine agree to an immediate ceasefire. He threatened sanctions against Russian trading partners and even said the Friday summit would be a failure if he didn’t convince Putin to stop the fighting and end the punishing aerial attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

But at the summit in Anchorage, Trump caved to Putin’s hardline refusal to accept a ceasefire until Ukraine agrees to cede even more than the approximately 20% of the country it has already occupied during the brutal 3-1/2 year invasion.

He explicitly supports the Russian demands for recognition of its control over the occupied province of Crimea and a guarantee that Ukraine won’t ever join NATO. The president also suggested he agrees with the idea of Ukraine handing over parts of the Donbas region that it has defended at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.

Ukraine does not want to agree to any recognition of Russian dominion over occupied lands, but might accept a freezing of the effective border along the current military front lines running through four southeastern provinces.

It also wants some kind of ironclad Western security guarantees to prevent Russia from launching new attacks in the future to seize even more of the country.

The European political heavy-hitters are scrambling to safeguard Ukraine’s future and protect the continent from any widening aggression from Moscow.

The remarkable show of unity is a sign of their concern over coming over the results of the Alaska summit, which many see as a clear win for Putin because he won Trump over without making any concessions.

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