Trump says that he will meet Putin in Alaska next Friday for the first American summit-Russia since 2021

US President Donald Trump said that he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin next Friday in Alaska to discuss the end of the war in Ukraine, a potential breakthrough after weeks to express frustration that was not done more to repress the fights.

The Kremlin has not yet confirmed the details, which Trump announced on social networks, but the two nations said they expected a meeting to be able to perform next week.

Such a summit can be essential in a war that started more than three years ago when Russia has invaded its Western neighbor and has led to tens of thousands of deaths – although there is no guarantee that this will prevent the fighting since Moscow and kyiv remain far from their peace conditions.

In comments to the Journalists of the White House before his post confirming the date and the place, Trump suggested that any agreement would probably imply “an exchange of territories”, but he gave no details. Analysts, some of whom were close to the Kremlin, suggested that Russia could propose to give up a territory that it controls outside the four regions it claims to have annexed.

Trump said his meeting with Putin would present himself before any sitting sitting involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump also agreed to meet Putin even if the Russian chief did not meet Zelenskyy. This attracted fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent’s largest conflict since the Second World War.

If this happens, the meeting would be the first American summit-Russia since 2021, when the president of the time, Joe Biden, met Putin in Geneva.

Trump’s announcement that he planned to welcome one of the American opponents on American soil broke with the expectations of their meeting in a third country. The gesture gives Putin validation after the United States and its allies have long sought to make him a pariah during his war against Ukraine.

At the start of Putin’s mandate, he regularly met his American counterparts. This dropped and the tone became more tough while tensions were mounting between Russia and the West after Moscow illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine in 2014 and faces allegations of interference in the 2016 US elections.

Putin’s latest visit to the United States took place in 2015 when he attended the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York.

Trump almost two weeks ago rose his ultimatum to impose additional sanctions on Russia and introduce secondary prices targeting countries that buy Russian oil if the Kremlin has not moved to a regulation.

The deadline was Friday. But the White House did not answer questions that evening on the state of possible sanctions after the announcement by Trump of an upcoming meeting with Putin.

Before Trump announced the meeting with Putin, his efforts to put pressure on Russia to stop the fighting had accessed any progress. The largest army in the Kremlin progresses slowly in Ukraine at a high price in troops and armor while relentlessly bombing the Ukrainian cities.

Intense fights continue

The Ukrainian forces are locked in intense battles along the 1,000-kilometer front line that winds from the northeast to the south-east of Ukraine. The Pokrovsk region of the eastern region of Donetsk takes the weight of punishment while Russia seeks to break out in the neighboring region of Dnipropetrovsk. Ukraine has significant labor shortages.

Intense fights also take place in the border region north of Sumy in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces engage in Russian soldiers to prevent reinforcements from being sent from there to Donetsk.

In the Pokrovsk region of Donetsk, a commander said that he thought that Moscow was not interested in peace.

“It is impossible to negotiate with them. The only option is to defeat them,” said Buda, commander of a drone unit in the Spartan brigade, to the Associated Press. He only used his appeal index, in accordance with the rules of the Ukrainian army.

“I would like them to agree and for all this to stop, but Russia will not agree. This does not want to negotiate. The only option is therefore to defeat them,” he said.

Putin makes calls

The Kremlin said on Friday that Putin had a telephone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during which he informed Xi of his meeting results earlier this week with Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff. Kremlin officials said Xi “had expressed support for the long -term Ukrainian crisis.”

Putin is scheduled to visit China next month. He also recently had telephone conversations with the leaders of South Africa, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Bélarus, the Kremlin said.

Calls have suggested to at least one analyst that Putin may want to inform Russia’s most important allies about a potential regulation that could be reached at a summit with Trump.

“This means that a sort of real peace agreement was concluded for the first time,” said Sergei Markov, pro-Kremlin Moscow analyst.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington reflection group, said Thursday in an assessment that “Putin remains not interested in putting an end to his war and tries to extract bilateral concessions in the United States without being significantly engaged in a peace process”.

“Putin continues to believe that time is on the side of Russia and that Russia can survive Ukraine and the West,” he said.