Trump, Putin To Meet In Alaska On August 15 In Push For Ukraine Ceasefire

<p>President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 for talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>The highly anticipated meeting comes as Trump said negotiations involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy were edging closer to a ceasefire agreement. The potential deal, he hinted, could involve Ukraine giving up some of its territory after more than three years of conflict.</p>
<p>Speaking to reporters at the White House earlier in the day, Trump suggested the agreement might include a land swap.<br />”There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” the Republican president said.</p>
<p>The Kremlin later confirmed the summit in an online statement. Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said the talks would focus on options for achieving a lasting peace in Ukraine. “This will evidently be a challenging process, but we will engage in it actively and energetically,” Ushakov said.</p>
<p>In his nightly address, Zelenskiy said a ceasefire was possible if enough pressure was applied to Moscow. He noted he had spoken with leaders from more than a dozen countries and that his team remained in constant contact with Washington.</p>
<p>Putin claims four Ukrainian regions &mdash; Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson &mdash; as well as Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Russian forces do not fully control all the claimed areas.</p>
<p>Bloomberg News reported earlier that US and Russian officials were working toward an agreement that could solidify Moscow&rsquo;s control over seized territories. A White House official dismissed the report as speculation, and the Kremlin did not comment. Reuters could not independently confirm the story.</p>
<p>While Ukraine has signaled some flexibility in ending the war, ceding about one-fifth of its territory would be a deeply painful and politically difficult decision for Zelenskiy&rsquo;s government.</p>
<p>Tyson Barker, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former deputy special representative for Ukraine&rsquo;s economic recovery at the State Department, said the proposal described by Bloomberg would almost certainly be rejected by Kyiv. “The best the Ukrainians can do is remain firm in their objections and their conditions for a negotiated settlement, while demonstrating their gratitude for American support,” Barker said.</p>
<p>According to Bloomberg, the proposed deal would have Russia halt its offensive in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia along current battle lines.</p>
<h2>A Rare Alaska Summit</h2>
<p>The last major diplomatic meeting in Alaska was in March 2021, when senior officials from then-President Joe Biden&rsquo;s administration met Chinese counterparts in Anchorage. That gathering quickly turned tense, with both sides publicly trading sharp criticisms.</p>
<p>Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has made repairing ties with Russia and ending the war in Ukraine a priority. His remarks on Putin have swung between praise and harsh criticism. In recent weeks, he has shown growing frustration over Moscow&rsquo;s continued military push, even threatening to impose new sanctions and tariffs on Russia and countries that buy its exports if the Kremlin refused to end the fighting &mdash; the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two.</p>
<p>By Friday night, it remained unclear whether those measures would be enforced, delayed, or called off. On Wednesday, the administration took its first financial step against a buyer of Russian oil, placing an extra 25 percent tariff on goods from India over its imports from Moscow.</p>
<p>Trump&rsquo;s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Putin in Moscow for three hours on Wednesday in what both sides described as constructive talks.</p>
<p>Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a strong ally of Ukraine, said earlier on Friday that a pause in fighting could be near. Speaking after meeting with Zelenskiy, he said, “There are certain signals, and we also have an intuition, that perhaps a freeze in the conflict &mdash; I don’t want to say the end, but a freeze in the conflict &mdash; is closer than it is further away. There are hopes for this.”</p>
<p>Tusk added that Zelenskiy remained cautious but optimistic, and that Ukraine wanted Poland and other European nations to be involved in shaping any ceasefire or future peace agreement.</p>