Trump and Putin meet in Alaska for discussions in Ukraine next week

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska next Friday To discuss the future of the war in Ukraine.

Trump announced the meeting of August 15 on social networks and was later confirmed by a Kremlin spokesperson, who said that the location was “quite logical” given the relative proximity of Alaska with Russia.

The spokesperson added that Trump had been invited to Russia for a second potential summit.

There was no immediate reaction from Ukraine.

The announcement of the meeting intervened a few hours after Trump pointed out that Ukraine may have to give up the territory in order to end the war, which began with the large -scale invasion of its neighbor’s Russia in February 2022.

“You are looking at a territory that has been taking place for three and a half years, many Russians have died. Many Ukrainians have died,” Trump said in the White House on Friday.

“It’s very complicated. We will recover, we will change. There will be territorial exchanges, to improve the two.”

The American president has not provided more details on what this proposal would look like.

However, the American partner of the BBC, CBS News, citing familiar sources with the discussions, reports that the White House is trying to encroach European leaders to accept an agreement which would include Russia which would take the whole region of Donbas in the east of Ukraine and the maintenance of Crimea.

He would abandon the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which he partly occupies, as part of the proposed agreement, reports CBS.

Earlier Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin had proposed an arrangement similar to Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, during a recent meeting in Moscow.

It is not yet known whether the Ukrainian and European allies would accept such an agreement, given the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin remain far from the conditions of peace.

Zelensky managed to reject any prerequisite for territorial concessions.

A senior White House official told CBS that the planning of the meeting next Friday was still fluid, and it was always possible that Zelensky was involved to some extent.

Moscow failed to make a decisive breakthrough in its large -scale invasion, but occupies about 20% of the territory of Ukraine. The Ukrainian offensives, on the other hand, have not rejected the Russian forces.

Three cycles of direct talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul have failed to bring war closer, and Moscow’s military and political conditions are considered by Kyiv and its allies as the de facto capitulation of Ukraine.

Russian requirements include Ukraine becomes a neutral state, considerably reducing its soldiers and abandoning its NATO aspirations, as well as the lifting of Western sanctions imposed on Russia.

Moscow also wants Kyiv to remove its soldiers from the four regions that Russia partly occupies in southeast Ukraine and demobilize its soldiers.

Trump, however, insisted on Friday that the United States had “shot” a trilateral peace agreement between countries.

“European leaders want to see peace, President Putin, I believe, want to see peace, and Zelensky wants to see peace,” he told journalists.

“President Zelensky must get all his sound, everything he needs, because he will have to prepare to sign something and I think he works hard to do it,” said Trump.

Last month, Trump admitted to the BBC that after the four previous Witkoff visits, Putin disappointed it after the talks had initially led to optimism.

He has hardened his position against the Kremlin in recent weeks, imposing a deadline on Friday for Russia to accept a cease-fire in Ukraine or faces more radical sanctions.

But when approaching the deadline, the economic threat was quickly overshadowed by the plans that Trump and Putin meet in person to discuss a potential peace agreement.

On Friday, there was no announcement of new sanctions against Russia in the White House.

Trump and Putin spoke by telephone in February during the first direct exchange between the leaders of the two countries since the large -scale invasion of Russia.

The last time an American president met Putin was in 2021 when Joe Biden met the Russian president at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland.