Zelenskyy wins the EU, the support of NATO as he seeks his place at the table with Trump and Putin
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the support of Europe and NATO on Sunday when he joined diplomatic support. It is a summit of Russia-US this week, where kyiv fears that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump can try to dictate conditions to end the war and a half.
Trump, who for weeks had threatened new sanctions against Russia for omitting the conflict, announced last Friday that he would hold the August 15 summit with Putin in Alaska.
A White House official said on Saturday that Trump was open to Zelenskyy’s attendance, but that current preparations were for a bilateral meeting with Putin.
Last week, the chief of the Kremlin excluded the meeting of Zelenskyy, saying that the conditions for such a meeting were “unfortunately still far” to be fulfilled.
Trump said that a potential agreement would imply “an exchange of territories towards improving the two (sides)”, a statement that has aggravated the Ukrainian alarm that he could make the pressure to make more land. Zelenskyy says that all decisions made without Ukraine will be “dead” and impassable.
Potential of Russia-US Deal
On Saturday, the leaders of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Finland and the European Commission said that any diplomatic solution was to protect the security interests of Ukraine and Europe.
“The United States has the power to force Russia to seriously negotiate,” the head of the EU foreign policy Kaja Kallas said on Sunday.
EU’s foreign ministers will meet on Monday to discuss the next steps, she said.
US vice-president JD Vance said in an interview with Fox News that a regulation negotiated between Russia and Ukraine will probably not satisfy, and that any peace agreement will likely leave Moscow and “unhappy” Kyiv.
He said the United States is targeting a regulation that both countries can accept.
NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, told ABC News that the summit on Friday “will aim to test Putin, how seriously it was to put an end to this terrible war”.
“These are, of course, security guarantees, but also the absolute need to recognize that Ukraine decides on its own future, that Ukraine must be a sovereign nation, deciding on its own geopolitical future.”
Russia, which launched a large -scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, now has almost a fifth of the country.
Rutte said that a future peace agreement could not include legal recognition of Russian control over Ukrainian land, although it can include de facto recognition.
He compared it to the situation after the Second World War when the United States accepted that the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were de facto controlled by the Soviet Union, but did not legally recognize their annexation.
Russian officials criticize Europe
Zelenskyy said on Sunday: “The end of the war must be fair, and I am grateful to all those who stand with Ukraine and our people today.”
Andrew Rasiulis, a Canadian Global Affairs Institute scholarship holder and a retired official of the National Defense Department, joins us to talk about the latest news that a meeting of Trump-Putin could perform next week and the signals of the Witkoff-Putin meeting.
A European official said that Europe had found a counter-propelle to that of Trump, but refused to provide details. Russian officials accused Europe of trying to thwart Trump’s efforts to end the war.
“The Imbeleclles Euro are trying to prevent American efforts to help resolve the Ukrainian conflict,” former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev published on social networks on Sunday.
Russian ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a vituperative declaration that the relationship between Ukraine and the European Union resembled “necrophilia”.
Roman Alekhin, a Russian war blogger, said that Europe had been reduced to the role of a spectator.
“If Putin and Trump come directly to an agreement, Europe will face a fait accompli. kyiv, even more,” he said.
Captured territory
No details of the proposed territorial exchange to which Trump alluded was officially announced.
In addition to Crimea, which he seized in 2014, Russia officially claimed the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as hers, although she controls only about 70% of the last three. It holds smaller pieces of territory in three other regions, while Ukraine says it has a ribbon in the Kursk Russia region.
Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, said that a swap could involve Russia by putting more than 1,500 square kilometers to Ukraine and obtaining 7,000 square kilometers, which, according to him, said Russia will capture in about six months.

He has provided no evidence to support these figures. Russia only took 500 square kilometers of territory in July, according to Western military analysts, who say that its crushing advances took place at the price of very strong victims.
Ukraine and its European allies have been haunted for months by the fear that Trump, eager to claim the merit of having made peace and hoping to seal lucrative trade agreements between the United States and Russia, could align with Putin to conclude an agreement which would be deeply disadvantageous towards kyiv.
They had attracted recently encouragement when Trump, having surrounded strong pressure on Zelenskyy and had publicly reprimanded him in the Oval office in February, began criticizing Putin. Russia recently defeated Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with its heaviest air attacks in the war.
But the imminent summit of Putin-Trump accepted during a trip to Moscow by Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, revived the fears that kyiv and Europe are not sidelined.
“What we will see from Alaska will almost certainly be a disaster for Ukraine and Europe,” wrote Phillips P. O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
“And Ukraine will face the most terrible dilemma. Do they accept this humiliating and destructive affair? Where are they traveling, uncertain of the support of European states?”
Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told Ukrainian radio on Sunday that kyiv’s partnership with his European allies was essential to counter any attempt to keep him away from the table.
“For us at the moment, a joint position with Europeans is our main resource.”
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