Kyiv drives as Trump kisses Putin’s terms

Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a call on Wednesday that he would press Vladimir Putin during the war in Ukraine.

But on Saturday, after having deployed the red carpet for Putin at a top with high stakes in Alaska, the American president seemed to have aligned himself on the Russian chief, echoing the position and the rhetoric of the Kremlin.

The change aroused a strong response from Ukrainian officials, soldiers and civil society, who reacted with frustration and accused Trump of having undermined their efforts to end the Russian war.

In an article on Truth Social, Trump said that he wanted to “go directly to a peace agreement, which would end the war and not to a simple cease-fire agreement, which would not often keep”.

He also suggested that the United States would not pursue the threats of new sanctions against Russia, signaling a distance from efforts to limit the Kremlin war strategy.

In recent weeks, Trump had publicly expressed his frustration towards Putin on his intransigence and his relentless bombing of civilians. His change of tone caused an alarm and a feeling of betrayal to kyiv on Saturday which were deepening when the details of the meeting emerged.

Putin asked Ukraine to withdraw from regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as a condition to end the Russian war, but told Trump that he could freeze the rest of the front line if his basic requests were satisfied, four people familiar with the Financial Times said.

“This is a stab on the back,” said a senior Ukrainian official at the FT, describing a quarter of Trump.

“He just wants a quick agreement,” said another senior Ukrainian official.

Oleksandr Merezhko, president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Ukrainian Parliament, summed up the outcome of the Trump-Putin summit for his country in a word: “horrible”.

“It seems that Trump is aligned with Putin and they could both start to force us to accept a peace treaty, which actually means the capitulation of Ukraine,” he said.

“The idea of the summit, as we explained by Trump and Rubio, was to present Putin an immediate ceasefire request. And if he rejects this proposal, there would be serious consequences for him,” said Merezhko. “Putin rejected this by offering a ceasefire instead as a peace treaty, and we don’t see Trump any reaction, not to mention serious consequences.”

Zelenskyy was now invited by Trump to return to Washington for interviews in the Oval Office on Monday-the same executive where, six months ago, he was ambushed by the American president and his vice-president JD Vance on kyiv’s reluctance to engage in a peace agreement on the United States on the terms that were favorable to Moscow at the time.

Ukrainian officials said Zelenskyy would not agree to hand over Donetsk and Luhansk – a long -standing red line from kyiv – but that it would be open to discuss the territory’s issue with Trump on Monday and during a future trilateral meeting with Trump and Putin.

Any transfer of territory would arouse concerns in Ukraine on its sovereignty. In addition, Kyiv fears that the abandonment of renouncing his chain of highly fortified cities of the part controlled by the Ukrainian in the Donetsk region, to offer Russia a springboard for future offensives.

Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukrainian MP and former Deputy Prime Minister, thought about how “the food of Putin’s ambitions and objectives” could end the war and dissuade the Russian president from grouping and launching new invasions later. “How will it guarantee that no new attack is led?” She asked.

The prospect of giving vast expanses of populated territory that the Russian army has never managed to seize would trigger “a lot of tension in society” according to Olga Aivazovska, head of the board of directors of Opora, a Horlog of Ukrainian civil society.

“It will also open up why we have defended ourselves all these years,” she said.

Roksolana Pidlasa, deputy for the ruling party of Zelenskyy, said that Putin had asked Donetsk and Luhansk “precisely because it is unacceptable for Ukraine”.

“His goal is not peace,” she said. “It raises sanctions and trapping Ukraine in development limbo.”

“This summit was a huge mistake and a huge victory for Putin,” said Alexander Khara, an analyst at the Center for Defense Think-Tank Strategies based in kyiv and former Ukrainian diplomat.

If the talks were to fail, Trump could attach the blame outright on Zelenskyy, he warned.

“Since 2014, the Russians have considered an illegitimate Ukrainian government, they will therefore not consider Zelenskyy as a capable interlocutor, especially when they have resources and they believe they can achieve their objectives by military means,” he said.

The talks took place while a Ukrainian military extent has trouble repelling the summer offensive of Russia.

Last weekend, the Russian army had a 10-kilometer lead near the Dobropillia coal extraction city, but it was interrupted this week, Ukraine and Volodyr Zelenskyy said. Enducted units in combat such as the Azov First Corps and the 79th Air Assault Brigade were precipitated towards this part of the front line to prevent the advance from transforming into breakthrough.

The president of Ukraine welcomed the “success in certain extremely difficult fields of the Donetsk region”, but said that Russia would rely on its offensive in the coming days “in order to create more favorable political circumstances for interviews with global actors”.

Near Pokrovsk, a city center and logistics in the past strategic that the Russian army is now close to the entourage, the commander of a small strike drone unit said that any lull in the fighting was unlikely.

“The reality is that negotiations are negotiations, while waiting for the fighting to continue and if we do not face it, no negotiations will save us,” wrote Oleksandr Solonko on Telegram.

In the Ukrainian capital, the week of frantic diplomatic exchanges which led to the Alaska meeting had a tangible effect: a strange silence, while the Russian Kamikaze drones stopped targeting kyiv while the preparations for the meeting were underway – even when they continued to strike the cities closer to the front line.

But an alarm of the air raids briefly burned kyiv on Saturday afternoon, triggering a new anxiety that the Russian drones loaded with explosives as well as ballistic missiles would soon run again towards the capital.